Crowdfunding

How to spell crowdfunding

12 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce crowdfunding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crowdfunding mean?

1. nounThe practice of raising money for a project or venture by collecting small contributions from a large number of people, typically online.

Crowdfunding in a sentence

• The inventor turned to crowdfunding to launch her gadget without a bank loan.

• The charity met its target through crowdfunding in just three days.

Where does crowdfunding come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern English compound, coined in the late 2000s by joining two everyday words: 'crowd', meaning a large gathering of people, and 'funding', the act of providing money for a project. 'Crowd' descends from the Old English verb 'crudan', meaning 'to press or push', so a crowd was literally a press of bodies; 'fund' comes from the Latin 'fundus', meaning 'bottom' or 'foundation', the same root that gives us 'foundation' itself. The word followed the pattern of 'crowdsourcing', which appeared a few years earlier, and it spread rapidly alongside online platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo around 2008 to 2012. The spelling is mercifully regular, written as one solid word with no hyphen, though writers sometimes hesitate over whether to split it. Its quick rise from internet jargon to dictionary entry makes it one of the clearest examples of a digital-age coinage.

How the word is built

• crowd (a large group of people)
• fund (to provide money)
• -ing (gerund/noun suffix)