What a word cloud is
A word cloud is a picture made of the words in a text. The more often a word appears, the bigger it is drawn. One glance tells you what a speech, an article or a pile of survey answers is mostly about, without reading every line.
Word clouds are popular in classrooms, presentations and reports because they turn a block of text into something people actually look at. They are a summary, not an analysis, but a good one for starting a conversation.
How to make a word cloud
- Paste your text into Your text. The page opens with a short paragraph about climate change so you can see a finished cloud straight away.
- Wait half a second. The cloud is redrawn every time you stop typing.
- Adjust the look with the menus under the text box:
- Number of words: 50, 100, 150 or 250
- Shape: Circle, Square, Diamond, Triangle, Star or Heart (cardioid)
- Colors: Bold, Ocean, Forest, Sunset or Black and grey
- Font: Sans serif, Serif, Condensed or Monospace
- Word direction: All horizontal, Some vertical, Half vertical or Angled
- Background: White, Dark or Transparent
- Use the Options buttons to choose what is counted: Ignore common words, Ignore case and Include numbers.
- Press New layout to shuffle the words into a fresh arrangement.
- Press Download PNG to save the picture as word-cloud.png.
Under the picture, a line lists the five most used words with their counts, so you can see the numbers behind the sizes.
Example
With the sample text and the default settings, the counts behind the cloud are:
| Word | Times used |
|---|---|
| carbon | 2 |
| cities | 2 |
| climate | 2 |
| emissions | 2 |
| energy | 2 |
| heat | 2 |
| oceans | 2 |
| water | 2 |
| absorb | 1 |
| around | 1 |
The line under the cloud reads “Most used: carbon (2), cities (2), climate (2), emissions (2), energy (2)”. Words with the same count are listed in alphabetical order. “Cities” and “cities” were counted as one word because Ignore case is on.
How the cloud is built
First the text is split into words and counted, using the same method as the word frequency counter. Words shorter than two letters are skipped. If Ignore common words is on, words such as “the”, “is” and “with” are removed. The most frequent words are kept, up to the number you chose.
Then each word gets a font size. The most frequent word gets the largest size, sized so that it fits across the image. Other words are scaled between that and a minimum size using a square root curve. A straight line would make the top word huge and everything else tiny; the curve keeps mid-frequency words readable.
Finally the words are placed one by one, biggest first, starting from the middle and spiralling outwards until each finds a free spot inside the chosen shape. The drawing is done by wordcloud2.js, an open source library, on a canvas of 1600 by 1100 pixels. That is large enough for a slide or a printed handout.
Tips for a better word cloud
- Use enough text. A few sentences produce a cloud where most words appear once and are the same size. A page or more gives clearer differences.
- Clean the text first. Page numbers, headings repeated on every page and names of speakers in a transcript can crowd the cloud. Remove them, or switch off Include numbers.
- Join phrases you want kept together. The cloud works with single words. To keep a name such as “New York” together, join the words with a hyphen (“New-York”) before making the cloud. The find and replace tool can do this for every occurrence at once.
- Pick colors for the background. On the Dark background, the Ocean, Forest and Black and grey palettes switch to lighter shades so the words stay readable.
- Fewer words, bigger impact. For a slide, 50 words is often enough. For a poster, try 150 or 250.
- Check the numbers. A word cloud shows rough differences well but exact ones poorly. When the counts matter, read them in the word frequency counter or look for repeats with the duplicate word finder.
Other ways to make a word cloud
Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. There is no built-in word cloud. You can add one through an add-in from the Office store, or make the image here and insert it as a picture.
Google Docs and Slides. Google Docs has no word cloud feature either. Download the PNG from this page and insert it with Insert, then Image.
Code. In Python, the wordcloud package makes clouds with a few lines, for example WordCloud().generate(text).to_file("cloud.png"). In JavaScript, wordcloud2.js, the library used on this page, draws onto any canvas element.