I read in a recent newspaper article: “Footage of densely crowded streets and crammed queues in London showed hoards of shoppers ignoring, or unable to obey, social distancing measures.”
That’s incorrect.
- A hoard is an accumulated store of something, and the verb to hoard means to accumulate a store of something.
- A crowd or a mob is a horde.
You can’t have hoards of shoppers. They meant hordes. It’s sometimes happened this year that hordes of shoppers have bought toilet rolls with a view to having hoards of them.
You can read about the difference between horde and hoard and a whole lot more, in the English Digital Content style guide.
