noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 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. countable, uncountable

   "P&G is one of InnoCentive’s earliest and best customers, but the company works with other crowdsourcing networks as well."

2. 2
   Work done by a large group of anonymous users wordnet

Verb

1. 1
   present participle and gerund of crowdsource form-of, gerund, participle, present

Synonyms

All synonyms

open outsourcing

Example

More examples

"The fun thing about crowdsourcing is letting other people do the work for us."

Etymology

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

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.