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By testing collective nouns in French with the approximators espèce, sorte and genre ( kind, sort, type), this paper studies how these nouns can have a categorical and / or an approximate interpretation and the way they react in both cases. Although behaving generally in the same way as standard nouns, collective nouns are different both in their susceptibility to be interpreted differently and in the specific features involved in their approximate interpretation. The study also highlights the relevance of the distinction between intercategorical and intracategorical approximate readings proposed by Gerhard-Krait & Vassiliadou (2017).