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Can we use "fury" to refer to a large crowd? As in this sentence:

There was a fury of people around the crashed building after the bombardment.

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    I think you heard flurry, rather than fury; in that case, it didn't mean "large crowd", it meant "handful of people moving around quickly", same as in "snow flurry".
    – Dan Bron
    Nov 25, 2015 at 13:49

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This isn't correct usage in a technical sense, and is not a standard idiom. However, in written English it's not uncommon to use words in a metaphorical or evocative sense, to create a feeling that may actually be more true-to-life then a simply accurate description. If you simply said "a large crowd of people", it doesn't tell you anything about how they are acting -- "a fury of people" makes it clear that the crowd is angry and roiling. It's critical with this type of writing to keep it unambiguous -- if you just said "a fury" instead of "a fury of people", it would be unclear what is actually happening.

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