How Iconic, A Word Is Worth Thousands of Pictures

"Picture a dictionary that doesn't need words to get the point across."

"It started after Edward Boatman read the book The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. The book is about Professor James Murray, the man who compiled the first Oxford English Dictionary. But Murray didn't do it alone. He had an army of people ready to help define every word in the English language."

"So Boatman thought he'd do something similar: use crowdsourcing to gather an army of people to define words, but instead of using other words to do it, they'd use icons."

"Thus the Noun Project was born."