Paste any text. It counts every word, drops the ones that carry no meaning, and packs the rest into a cloud — bigger word, more often used. Runs entirely in this page, and the picture saves as a PNG.
The cloud is a picture of the counts. Focus it and use the arrow keys to step through its words one at a time; the same numbers are listed in the Top words table further down.
| # | word | count | share | relative frequency |
|---|
Counting. The text is lowercased and cut into words on anything that is not a letter, a digit
or an apostrophe. A trailing 's is dropped, so sister's and sister
are the same word. Nothing is stemmed beyond that: times and time stay apart,
because guessing at stems quietly invents counts that are not in the text.
Common words. With skip common words on, the words below are thrown away before counting.
They are the glue of English — frequent everywhere, telling you nothing about this particular text.
Switch it off and watch the swallow the picture: that is what the list is for.
Sizing and colour. A word’s size follows (count ÷ top count) raised to the
power 0.55 — a ratio, not a stretch from the rarest word to the busiest one, so a text
whose most-used word appears twice does not read like a landslide. Colour is the other half of the story:
each word is dropped into one of five bands by where its count sits between the rarest and the most
frequent, amber for the top band down to muted grey for the bottom.
Packing. Words are laid down largest first. Each one walks out from the centre along an Archimedean spiral until it finds a spot where its box touches nothing already placed, then creeps back toward the centre while it still fits. After the first three, about one word in five is turned on its side. The whole set of sizes is then binary-searched up or down until the biggest scale that fits the canvas is found — which is why the cloud fills the frame at any window width.
Where it lies. A word cloud is a bad instrument and a good picture. Area grows faster than the eye reads it, so a word used ten times does not look ten times bigger than one used once; long words take more space than short ones at the same count; and position means nothing at all — a word near the middle just got placed early. The table on the right holds the honest numbers. Use the cloud to notice, the table to compare.
Everything here runs in this page: no network requests, no storage, no analytics. Your text stays in the tab, and the PNG is drawn from the same canvas you are looking at.