Last checked by the TextEditor.com team
How a word cloud is made
A word cloud counts how often each word shows up, then draws the words that are used most. The more often a word is used, the bigger it gets. Common words like "the" and "of" are left out first, or they would fill the whole picture.
Capital letters do not make a new word, so "Cat" and "cat" count together. The cloud shows the spelling used most often, so names keep their capital letter. A word with 's, like "Alice's", counts as "Alice". Words joined by a hyphen, like "well-known", stay one word.
the cat sat on the mat and the cat looked at the dog
- cat 2
- sat 1
- mat 1
- looked 1
- dog 1
Struck out words are on the English list of common words. The rest are counted, most used first.
Why common words are left out
In any long text, a few short words take up a big share. This pattern is called Zipf's law. In the Brown Corpus, a collection of about one million words of American English, "the" makes up nearly 7% of all words. Just 135 different words make up half of the text.
The example on this page is the first chapter of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It has 2,143 words. "The" alone is 4.2% of them, and 65% are words on the common word list. Leave them in, and the cloud says little about the story. Leave them out, and Alice, the rabbit and the door come forward.
Gray bars are common words. From the first chapter of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 2,143 words.
The tool has lists of common words for ten languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Chinese and Japanese. It picks the list from the words in your text. Open "Common words left out" in the tool to change the list. Add a word that you do not want, like a name that is on every page, or delete a word that you want to keep.
How big each word gets
The most used word gets the biggest size. The question is how fast the size drops for the other words. A word that is twice as tall also takes up about four times the space, because it is twice as wide too. So when the height grows with the count, a word used twice as often looks four times as important.
"Normal" sets the height by the square root of the count. Then the space a word covers grows with its count: twice the uses, twice the ink. "Strong" makes the top words stand out more. "Even" uses the logarithm, which keeps rare words readable.
Change a count to see each row change. The smallest word never goes below 16% of the biggest, so it stays readable.
How the words find a place
The biggest word goes in first, near the middle. Every next word starts in the middle too and walks out on a spiral. At each step the tool checks if the word would touch a word that is already there. It checks the shapes of the letters, not boxes around the words, so a small word can sit in the space under a "y" or beside a tall "T".
The check is fast because the picture is kept as a grid of bits, one bit per pixel. Thirty two pixels are tested at once. A shape like the heart is made by marking everything outside the heart as taken before the first word goes in.
The orange dots are the spots a word tried before it found a free one. The first word fits at once. Later words try hundreds of spots.
The spiral starts at a random angle. The tool uses a fixed starting number for the random choices, so the same text and settings give the same cloud every time. Press Shuffle to pick a new starting number and get a new layout.
What a word cloud cannot show
Tag clouds, the first word clouds, came to the big websites in 2004, when the photo site Flickr showed its most used photo tags that way. Two years later Flickr won a Webby award, and its five word speech was "sorry about the tag clouds". Many people still find them hard to read exactly.
Long words get more ink at the same size, so they look more important than they are. A study cited on Wikipedia's tag cloud page found that big words catch the eye most, but word length, position and the words next to them change that too. The colors and places in a cloud mean nothing.
Both words have the same count and the same size, but "encyclopedia" covers about 6 times as much space.
A cloud is good for a first look, a slide or a poster. To compare numbers, use a table. The word counter lists the top words and two word phrases with their exact share of the text.
Make a cloud from a list or survey answers
Tick "My text is a list" when you already have the counts. Put one word or phrase on each line and the count after it, with a space, a comma or a tab between them. Lines without a count count once, and the same line twice counts twice, so a column of survey answers pasted from a spreadsheet works as well.
Friendly staff, 14 Fast delivery, 11 Good price, 9 Easy returns 6 Packaging
In a list, a phrase like "Friendly staff" stays together as one entry.
In running text every word counts on its own. To keep a name like "New York" together there, join the words with a hyphen, "New-York". The find and replace tool can do this for the whole text at once. The word list in the tool is open for edits as well: click a word to change it, change its count, or remove it with ×.
PNG or SVG: which download to pick
| Download | Size | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| PNG | Twice the size on screen, for example 2,000 × 1,280 pixels for the cloud shape | Slides, documents, social posts, email. Works in every app. Print up to about 17 × 11 cm at 300 dots per inch. |
| SVG | Any size, the letters stay sharp | Posters, print shops and design apps. Colors and words can be changed later in Illustrator, Inkscape or Figma. |
| Copy image | Same as the PNG | Paste straight into a slide, a chat or a document with Ctrl+V. Shows only in browsers that can copy pictures. |
An SVG file keeps the words as text and names the font. Fonts like Segoe UI or Georgia are on most computers, but if the font is missing where the file is opened, a different one is used and words can touch. For a file that must look the same everywhere, use the PNG. PowerPoint, Word and Excel in Microsoft 365 can insert SVG files (checked November 2026).
The cloud is drawn on your device and the image is yours to use. To make the text itself look different, try the font converter, or draw a big headline in letters made of letters with the ASCII art generator.