Meaning

noun a group of cattle or sheep or other domestic mammals all of the same kind that are herded by humans

noun a group of wild mammals of one species that remain together: antelope or elephants or seals or whales or zebra

noun a crowd especially of ordinary or undistinguished persons or things

originFrom Middle English herde, heerde, heorde, from Old English hierd, heord (“herd, flock; keeping, care, custody”), from Proto-West Germanic *herdu, from Proto-Germanic *herdō (“herd”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kerdʰ- (“file, row, herd”). Cognate with German Herde, Danish hjord, Swedish hjord. Non-Germanic cognates include Albanian herdhe (“nest”) and Serbo-Croatian krdo.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0