A picture is worth a thousand words means that one image can carry an idea that would take a long stretch of writing to explain. It is American advertising talk of the 1910s and 1920s, not a Chinese proverb. The same thought is often put as ‘a picture tells a thousand words’ or ‘a picture paints a thousand words’.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’?
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This article has 471 words and two pictures - take your pick.
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This phrase emerged in the USA in the early part of the 20th century. Its introduction is widely attributed to Frederick R. Barnard, who published a piece commending the effectiveness of graphics in advertising with the title “One look is worth a thousand words”, in Printer’s Ink, December 1921. Barnard claimed the phrase’s source to be oriental by adding “so said a famous Japanese philosopher, and he was right”.
Printer’s Ink printed another form of the phrase in March 1927, this time suggesting a Chinese origin:
“Chinese proverb. One picture is worth ten thousand words.”
The arbitrary escalation from ‘one thousand’ to ‘ten thousand’ and the switching from Japan to China as the source leads us to smell a rat with this derivation. In fact, Barnard didn’t introduce the phrase - his only contribution was the incorrect suggestion that the country of origin was Japan or China. This has led to another popular belief about the phrase, that is, that it was coined by Confucius. It might fit the Chinese-sounding ‘Confucius he say’ style, but the Chinese derivation was pure invention.
Many things had been thought to be ‘worth ten thousand words’ well before pictures got in on the act; for example:
“One timely deed is worth ten thousand words” - The Works of Mr. James Thomson, 1802.
“That tear, good girl, is worth, ten thousand words” - The Trust: A Comedy, in Five Acts, 1808.
“One fact well understood by observation, and well guided development, is worth a thousand times more than a thousand words” - The American Journal of Education, 1858.
The idea that a picture can convey what might take many words to express was voiced by a character in Ivan S. Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, 1862:
“The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book.”
A similar idea was seen very widely in the USA from the early 20th century, in adverts for Doan’s Backache Kidney Pills, which included a picture of a man holding his back and the text “Every picture tells a story”.
Neither of the above led directly to ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. Who it was that married ‘worth ten thousand words’ with ‘picture’ isn’t known, but we do know that the phrase is American in origin. It began to be used quite frequently in the US press from around the 1920s onward. The earliest example I can find is from the text of an instructional talk given by the newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane to the Syracuse Advertising Men’s Club, in March 1911:
“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.”
This little essay clocks in at 471 words. Perhaps I should have drawn half a picture instead?
Brisbane’s talk reached the advertising trade within weeks. Printers’ Ink of 20 April 1911 printed extracts from it under the heading “Newspaper Copy That People Must Read”, introduced as an address before the Syracuse advertising club, and the advice is there in full: “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words. Use a picture with five words, a comparison in thirty words.” It sits in a passage about the power of comparison, alongside Brisbane’s example of a photographed pebble that reads as a grain of sand next to a housefly and as a boulder under a man on horseback: “If I take out the fly and put a man on horseback on top of the pebble you say it is a bowlder.” The line was being quoted back at the trade almost at once. A letter in Printers’ Ink on 8 June 1911, answering a claim that typographic ornament and atmosphere were nonsense, cites it as something “Mr. Brisbane said in a recent address”.
By 1915 the wording had already moved to the shape Barnard would use six years later, and it was Brisbane who was getting the credit for it. Printers’ Ink of 29 July 1915 carried an advertisement for Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper headed:
“A strong picture is worth ten thousand words.” - Arthur Brisbane
The advertisement made its case from that month’s Eastland disaster in Chicago, in which an excursion steamer rolled over at her moorings: “Pages of words cannot make you see a thing like the Eastland disaster.” The picture and the ten thousand words were already joined, and credited to Brisbane, six years before Barnard’s first advertisement.
Barnard’s 1927 advertisement can still be read in Printers’ Ink for 10 March 1927. It was placed by the Street Railways Advertising Co. and signed by that company’s national advertising manager, and its example was a Royal Baking Powder street car card reading “Make a Cake for Bobby”: “It reminded all mothers every day of a sure way to give a treat to their own children.” A Picture’s Worth, D. H. Hepting’s page at the University of Regina tracing the printed record, identifies Frederick R. Barnard as that company’s national advertising manager and places the earlier piece at pages 96 and 97 of the issue of 8 December 1921, where the subject was advertising on street cars.
The same page explains how Barnard ended up credited with a thousand words rather than the ten thousand he actually printed. Burton Egbert Stevenson’s Home Book of Proverbs, Maxims and Familiar Phrases logged both advertisements at page 2611 and misquoted the 1927 one, and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations repeated the slip at page 782 of its 16th edition. The wording most people use today owes as much to a quotation dictionary’s mistake as to anything Barnard wrote.
The Turgenev remark quoted above belongs to Bazarov, who is brushing aside the suggestion that a geologist would be better served by a book than by a drawing. Constance Garnett’s translation, the one that carried the novel to English readers, gives the line as “The drawing shows me at a glance what would be spread over ten pages in a book.” That is Brisbane’s point fifty years early, and it puts the saying alongside ‘the camera cannot lie’ and ‘actions speak louder than words’ as a claim about the limits of plain words.