I'm looking to refer to a group of facts and I'm not sure what the best term to use for them would be. From what I can tell there isn't any sort of standard collective noun for facts, so it's going to be a more a question of what the better way of stating it would be.
To illustrate, a collection of pages may make up a book, so a book of pages makes sense.
But what makes sense for a collection of facts?
Edit 1: to clarify here, I am looking to have the blank filled in: a _ of facts.
Edit 2: The context is that there are a large amount of small facts. Things like "The battle of Hastings was fought in 1066". I need to refer to various set collections of these facts when speaking to people, and so need a collective term for them. If each fact were a card, I would call a set collection of them a deck. So the use would be in a sentence like this: When I was learning history I found John's very useful.
Best Answer
Consider brief, précis, survey, overview, conspectus, digest, compilation, compendium, collation, corpus. A brief, for example, is "An attorney's legal argument in written form..." but formerly was also used as "A summary, précis or epitome; an abridgement or abstract", which all are forms of collections of facts. Collation is a surprisingly versatile word, the relevant meaning here being "A collection, a gathering" rather than "5. Any light meal or snack" or more-specialized "2. The Collationes Patrum ...", "3. A reading held from the work mentioned above...", and "4. The light meal taken by monks after the reading service mentioned above". For survey the relevant meaning is "A particular view; an examination ... of all the parts or particulars of a thing", which is how it is used in the phrase survey article, "... a paper that is a work of synthesis, ... a survey or summary of a field".
Update 1 I disagree in general with the comment
but will address it only for compendium. Wiktionary shows "1. A short, complete summary; an abstract" and "2. A list or collection of various items". To a question like "Have you got anything about it?", one could reasonably reply either of
but in the former "of facts" seems redundant.
Note, compendious is an adjective for which Wiktionary shows "1. containing a subset..., succinctly described; abridged and summarized" and "2. briefly describing a body of knowledge". Certainly the latter sense is appropriate for "collection of facts". On the other hand, the definition and synonyms of it inject a qualification of brevity.