Word.ws English Dictionary

crowdsourcing

crowdsourcing noun: the delegation of a task to a large diffuse group in order to introduce new or more developed skill sets and improve efficiency. There is usually no substantial monetary compensation involved. Also the present participle and gerund of crowdsource.

Noun

crowdsourcing (countable and uncountable, plural crowdsourcings)

  1. The delegation of a task to a large diffuse group in order to introduce new or more developed skill sets and improve efficiency. There is usually no substantial monetary compensation involved.
    • P&G is one of InnoCentive’s earliest and best customers, but the company works with other crowdsourcing networks as well.2006 June, Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing”, in Wired, archived from the original on 21 Jul 2006
    • While not a new phenomenon, crowdsourcing is really growing as a business trend.2007 January, Jessi Hempel, “Tapping the Wisdom of the Crowd”, in Business Week

Also used as

crowdsourcing is also the present participle and gerund of crowdsource.

crowdsourcing meaning in Malay, Indonesian and Persian

crowdsourcing in Malay

delegation of a task
sumber khalayak

crowdsourcing in Indonesian

delegation of a task
urun daya

crowdsourcing in Persian

delegation of a task
جمعسپاری jam'-sepâri

Examples of crowdsourcing in a sentence

  • Amazon Mechanical Turk is a web marketplace for crowdsourcing microtasks, such as answering surveys and image tagging.
  • Crowdsourcing and other types of distributed work or microlabor are likely to increase in frequency in the years to come.
  • His innovative teenage peers were horsing around in the digital playground, looking to create the next social medium or crowdsourcing technique.

All 11 example sentences with crowdsourcing

Synonyms of crowdsourcing

Forms of crowdsourcing

pluralcrowdsourcings

Origin of crowdsourcing

Coined by American journalist Jeff Howe in 2006, see quotations. From crowd + sourcing, by analogy with outsourcing.

Questions about crowdsourcing

What does crowdsourcing mean?
Crowdsourcing means the delegation of a task to a large diffuse group in order to introduce new or more developed skill sets and improve efficiency. There is usually no substantial monetary compensation involved.
What is crowdsourcing in Malay?
Crowdsourcing in Malay is sumber khalayak. See Crowdsourcing meaning in Malay.
What part of speech is crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is a noun.
What is the plural of crowdsourcing?
The plural of crowdsourcing is crowdsourcings.

Words near crowdsourcing in the dictionary

  1. crowdsource
  2. crowdsourced
  3. crowdsourcer
  4. crowdsourcers
  5. crowdsources
  6. crowdsourcing
  7. crowdsourcings
  8. crowdsurf
  9. crowdsurfed
  10. crowdsurfer
  11. crowdsurfers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crowdsourcing (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “crowdsourcing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crowdsourcing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.