Crowd of information

[EmpanadaRica]

Hola a todos,

I would like to ask the native speakers if they ever heard of the 'dicho hecho' 'crowd of information'.

An American acquaintance of mine insists (i.e. is adamant) this is quite commonly used but I don't think I have ever come across it.
Crowd in my own experience is a word I have come across with far more often pertaining to human beings or something 'representative' of human beings ('A crowd of people' or 'A crowd of internetproviders' e.g.).
For information I have seen e.g. 'A (large) chunk of information' or 'The majority of the information' or 'Heaps of information' something like this.

Can someone tell me if this is a common expression in the US or in Great Britain?

[Perikles]

Originally Posted by EmpanadaRica

I would like to ask the native speakers if they ever heard of the 'dicho hecho' 'crowd of information'.

An American acquaintance of mine insists (i.e. is adamant) this is quite commonly used but I don't think I have ever come across it.
Crowd in my own experience is a word I have come across with far more often pertaining to human beings or something 'representative' of human beings ('A crowd of people' or 'A crowd of internetproviders' e.g.).
For information I have seen e.g. 'A (large) chunk of information' or 'The majority of the information' or 'Heaps of information' something like this.

Can someone tell me if this is a common expression in the US or in Great Britain?

A crowd can only be collective noun for a countable group of individuals, such as a crowd of angry peasants. Since information is not a countable noun, a crowd of information actually makes no sense (unless you want to argue that digital information is a sequence of individual bits )

You are quite right. Heaps of, or loads of

[pjt33]

Never heard it. It's not in the BNC (100m words of British English), COCA (400m words of American English) or the Time Magazine Corpus. Google's first page of results all have it as part of a noun phrase (e.g. "crowd of information security professionals"). Ask your acquaintance what evidence he has that it isn't just part of his idiolect.

[EmpanadaRica]

Originally Posted by pjt33

Ask your acquaintance what evidence he has that it isn't just part of his idiolect.

I will do that..

Thanx a lot guys!

[Perikles]

Originally Posted by pjt33

Ask your acquaintance what evidence he has that it isn't just part of his idiolect.

Sometimes I really do approve of new words, and this is one of them.

[pjt33]

Originally Posted by Perikles

Sometimes I really do approve of new words, and this is one of them.

If it's younger than you then not by much. OED cites an example from 1948.

[Perikles]

Originally Posted by pjt33

If it's younger than you then not by much. OED cites an example from 1948.

I meant 'new' as post-Milton.

[poli]

I have not heard crowd of information, but I certainly understand its meaning.
What I have heard is crowded with information and I would guess that this is what your American acquaintance was referring to.
Example: The booklet is so crowded with information that I had to read it several times and still haven't grasped all the things it covers.

[EmpanadaRica]

Originally Posted by poli

I have not heard crowd of information, but I certainly understand its meaning.
What I have heard is crowded with information and I would guess that this is what your American acquaintance was referring to.
Example: The booklet is so crowded with information that I had to read it several times and still haven't grasped all the things it covers.

Yes poli, I thought of this too and in fact I asked my acquaintance if this was what he meant, but he insisted it was 'crowd of information' (which he then translated literally into Dutch which made it sound even worse to be honest because then it made even less sense to me. )

But thanx for the input!

[Tomisimo]

Out of curiosity, where is your American acquaintance from?