In this paper, I examine empirical foundations for distinguishing between two types of collective nouns, namely spatial collectives such as ‘stack of plates’ and social collectives like ‘committee of experts’. I revise a battery of tests proposed in the literature to distinguish between the two. I conclude that many of those tests fail since they neglect the intervening factor of (in)animacy, but there are some diagnostics that are reliable, and thus the distinction is linguistically relevant. Finally, I demonstrate that Slavic derivational morphology is sensitive to the spatial/social distinction.