Worth a Thousand Words

By Roger Overall

Here's a bit of fun. Did you know that our modern saying "A picture is worth a thousand words" comes from a Chinese proverb: "One picture is worth ten thousand words"? It’s been attributed to Confucius.

Except that’s hokum.

It isn’t a Chinese proverb at all. It certainly isn’t ancient. Despite being attributed by some to Confucius, it's less than a century old and has its origins in Western culture. Advertising to be exact. It appeared in a 1927 advertisement developed by Fred R. Barnard for Royal baking soda. Possibly, it is based on a quote by newspaper man Arthur Brisbane, who is credited in 1911 with saying, "Use a picture. It is worth a thousand words."

Roger

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Rev, Heng Sure: "Roger, the quote is ancient, and it's Chinese as well. The original goes, 'bai wen bu ru yi jian,' literally, 'one hundred hearings does not match a single viewing.'

"It's first recorded in a story from the Western Han Dynasty (2nd century B.C.E), and is attributed to a conversation between Emperor Han Xuan Di and a man named Zhao, held on a battlefield. It's an interesting story. Zhao's advice to his Emperor was to go check out the enemy troops for himself, because 'you'll see the actual situation at a glance, rather than my trying to describe it for you.' They eventually won the day and the Jiang barbarians were defeated. The Chinese love proverbs and this is a famous one."

Mike replies: Ball's in your court, Roger.  :-)

Roger responds: "This has sparked some interesting debate. Certainly 'one hundred hearings does not match a single viewing' is ancient, but isit the same as 'a picture is worth a thousand words'? I agree the sentiment is the same. You can decide for yourself whether the genuine venerable Chinese saying refers to a fixed image, or whether it is limited in its meaning to advising that seeing for yourself is better than having someone describe it to you. I sense they might be different. Or maybe I'm wrong.

"And here's a curious thing: 'one look is worth a thousand words' was also used in advertising circles in the early 1900s. In fact, our friend Fred R. Barnard used it himself. There is some information here (though some readers will splutter into their coffee at the mere suggestion of Wikipedia). More information, including my source material and the original advert with the Chinese proverb is here.

"The latter reference has an illustration with what appears to be Chinese writing. Could a TOP reader help with a translation? Is it a fabrication or is it the ancient saying referred to by Rev, Heng Sure? If anything, as the TOP community we could provide a valuable service and clear the origins up once and for all."

Mike replies: If there's one overarching motto of the Internet, it's that there is no "once and for all." We might settle the question, but it would penetrate an infinitesimal subset of the population, any segment of which could begin the argument anew at any time....

But I'm being entertained!

hugh crawford: "I used to have a T-shirt that said, 'A Picture is worth a thousand dollars.' I got at a trade show back in the 1980s. Oh, and the rule of thumb is, 'A picture is worth a thousand words if it runs at 30 column inches.'"

Mike replies: Maybe today the T-shirt would read, "A picture is worth 16 million pixels."

David Dyer-Bennet: "A thousand words is roughly six thousand bytes, so a picture worth that would be pretty small."

wchen: "Roger was right that the original Chinese quote (Bai wen bu ru yi jian) means, 'seeing for yourself is better than having someone describe it to you.' When you meet a pretty girl that you've heard about for some time through others but have never met before, you might say bai wen bu ru yi juan to mean, 'Oh, you really are a beauty!'

"The Chinese writing Roger refered to in his response reads 'Hua yi neng da wan yan,' literally, 'The meaning of a painting can equal thousands of words.' To me it seems like that's actually a quite awkward Chinese translation of the English expression 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' As an educated Chinese in his forties, this is the first time I've ever seen that as a 'Chinese' proverb."

Comments

[Nigel]

Post rationalising this explanation, it makes perfect sense. Ancient cultures were never as visually dominated as ours, and popular imagery didn't truly exist until the advent of the printing press. In fact it can be interesting trying to imagine oneself in a time where there were no mirrors and no significant representations of the human face (beyond religious iconography). And here's something fascinating. An art historian has come up with the idea that the resurrection itself wasn't a physical reality, but the response the existence of the shroud of Turin (which was real). If you had never seen an image of a human face, then an accurate representation of it might feel completely 'real'.

[William Schneider]

Doing the math then, one word = one milli-picture.

[Ed]

Folklore....I love it when it gets debunked!

Greets, Ed.

[Torquil Macneil]

Just about everything that can't be attributed to Oscar Wilde or Churchill gets dumped on the Ancient Chinese. The famous Chinese curse 'may you live in interesting times' is another phoney one.

[Don Daso]

A favorite debate topic, certainly. The phrase shows up in America in the 1920s onward. The Brisbane remark (the earliest source document) came from an instructional talk to the Syracuse Advertising Men's Club: "Use a picture. It's worth a thousand words,"
in March of 1911 all right...

[Bruno Masset]

Still, the dilettante sinologist in me would like to point out that in 61 BC, there was one general Zhao (赵充国) who, when discussing with Emperor Xuan how to crush a rebellion by the Qiang people, told the Emperor:

"Seeing once is better than hearing about the matter a hundred times. As judging military matters from afar is difficult, I'll go to the Qiang region and submit a battle plan from there for your approval"

Semantically speaking, close enough to the modern expression for me ;-)

[Glenn Allenspach]

Talk less. Shoot more.

[Manuel]

C'mon, nobody bought into that Confucius thing. 'Made in China' cameras have been there for a while, but not for that long...

[hugh crawford]

I used to have a T-shirt that said "A Picture is worth a thousand dollars." I got at a trade show back in the 1980s.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Given what it must have cost to have somebody sketch an illustration, transport it back to a major newspaper, and then have somebody manually prepare an etching based on the sketch, clearly they thought it was important to do what they could with illustrations. Which suggests to me that the interest in seeing things not near us pre-dates the printing press, it's just that we couldn't get very far in satisfying that interest until recently.

[Steve Jacob]

And there was me thinking it was the going rate for photojournalist compared to reporters...;-)

[Salviano Junior]

Millôr Fernandes a brazilian cartoonist, artist, author, and translator (from Rio, died last year at age of 88) has a classic phrase, about the pretense of that obvious supremacy of the image:

"One image worths a thousand words... say that without using a word."

Sometimes translated from Portuguese as:

“A picture is worth a thousand words, but try to say that in a picture”

[Photobook Taiwan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_words

a picture is worth a thousand word = 一張照片 勝過千言萬語.
that's a good picture is unable to disbribe through many many words.

百聞不如一見 'bai wen bu ru yi jian =Seeing is better than hearing a hundred times. that's self-seeing is more important than hearing or learning ex others.

[Bruno Masset]

Roger Overall wrote:
> The latter reference has an illustration with what appears to be Chinese
> writing. Could a TOP reader help with a translation? Is it a fabrication
> or is it the ancient saying referred to by Rev, Heng Sure?

Jeez. I'd have expected that by now, some competent Chinese speakers would have provided some additional enlightenment to this thread...
Anyway, as the silence is deafening, let me add my two cents again.

The illustration Roger refers to (畫意能達萬言) is, in fact, a literal translation of the English sentence "A picture is worth ten thousand words".

The fact that there's a slightly unnatural, literal structural match between the Chinese and the English sentences makes this dilettante sinologist suspect that this is a an originally English sentence that has been translated into Chinese.

Besides, a quick googling couldn't find any references establishing the use of 畫意能達萬言 or its rendition into more modern Chinese — e.g. "一画能达万言" — prior to the 20th century.

On the other hand, the ancient Chinese proverb Rev. Heng Sure and myself referred to is 百闻不如一见 which could be translated as "[Seeing once / one look] is better than hearing about the matter a hundred times"

A plausible propagation path is thus:

百闻不如一见 (ancient Chinese proberb)
　　　↓
One Look is Worth A Thousand Words (Barnard et al.)
　　　↓
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words (Barnard et al.)
　　　↓
畫意能達萬言 (fairly modern, literal Chinese translation)

Note that, as this example indicates, Westerners also had recognized the quantitative and qualitative information gap existing between the visual and linguistic channels.

This expression also conveys the general idea, I suppose.

[Francisco Cubas]

I never liked the the "thousand words" saying, for me is part of the stupidization enforced by the media. The spanish philosopher Fernando Savater inverted and said: "Every word is worth a thousand pictures, because It can evoke them all".