The paper deals with a description of collective nouns in modern Chinese through their structural and grammatical features. The author discusses approaches to classifying nouns proposed in Chinese linguistics. As the main grammatical feature of this class of words, Chinese grammars usually include their selective combination with measure words, up to the claim that it is impossible for collective nouns to collocate with single (discrete) measure words. A corpus-based analysis of language material, however, shows that this rule is not absolute and requires more detailed research, taking into account the achievements of the modern linguistic typology and grammatical semantics, since the meaning of collectiveness is relevant not only for the classification of nouns in the Chinese language, but also for the study of quantitative groups.