Word Cloud Generator: From Any Text
Paste any text and generate a word cloud showing the most frequent words at larger sizes. Customise colour scheme, size, font rotation, stop word filtering, and minimum word length. Download the result as a PNG. Runs entirely in your browser using a spiral placement algorithm; no uploads, no signup.
Top words by frequency
About word clouds
What is a word cloud?
A word cloud (also called a tag cloud) is a visual representation of word frequency in a text. Words that appear more often appear in larger fonts; less frequent words appear smaller. The result is a striking visual that gives a quick sense of which themes or topics dominate a piece of writing.
When are word clouds useful?
Survey responses (find the dominant themes in open-ended answers). Speech and essay analysis (visualise key concepts). Marketing reports (highlight common customer feedback). Classroom exercises (compare different writing samples). Social media monitoring (visualise mentions and reactions). They are not statistical analysis but a quick exploratory glance.
Stop word filtering
Common English words like "the", "and", "is", and "of" appear in almost any text but add little meaning to frequency analysis. The generator removes them by default. The built-in stop word list covers about 170 common English words. Disable filtering if you want to include them, or for non-English text where the filter does not apply.
The spiral placement algorithm
Words are placed in order of size (largest first). Each word is tested at the center of the canvas first, then in expanding spirals outward, until a position is found where it does not overlap any previously placed word. This is the same approach used by d3-cloud and the venerable wordle.net. The downside: if too many words are requested, the algorithm runs out of space and skips the smallest words.
Choosing colours
Teal & coral is the Gizmoop brand palette and works on white backgrounds. Rainbow gives a playful look. Monochrome is professional and prints well. Warm and cool palettes set a mood (warm for energetic topics, cool for analytical or neutral ones). The colour assignment cycles through the chosen palette; words near each other in size get different colors for visual contrast.
Sizing the canvas
The default 800x500 px works for most use cases. For presentations (Powerpoint, Keynote), use 1280x720 (16:9) or 1920x1080 (full HD). For printing, scale up to 2000+ px width. The download is at the exact canvas size; larger canvases produce larger PNG files.
Word rotation
Allowing some words to rotate vertically (90 degrees) helps pack more words into the available space and adds visual interest. The generator rotates a random ~40 percent of words when allowed. Disable rotation for a more conservative layout.
Limitations of word clouds
Critics note that word clouds make precise comparison hard (is "report" bigger than "data"? hard to tell), and that random word placement can be misleading. For serious frequency analysis, use the underlying counts table the generator shows below the cloud, or our keyword density tool. Use the cloud for visual impact and quick exploration, not for rigorous data presentation.
Privacy
The text you paste and the cloud you generate stay in your browser. Nothing is sent to any server. You can use the generator on confidential drafts or unpublished work without privacy concerns.
Alternatives to word clouds
For frequency analysis presented as a chart, a horizontal bar chart of the top 20 words is more accurate. For thematic analysis, topic modelling tools (LDA) extract meaningful themes from text. For competitive content analysis, our keyword density tool gives n-gram percentages. Word clouds remain the best tool for quick visual impressions and presentations.
It counts how often each word appears in your text, removes common stop words (the, and, is, etc.), then lays out the remaining words on an image with font size proportional to frequency. The most common words appear largest. This tool uses a spiral placement algorithm to fit words without overlapping.
Stop words are extremely common words (the, and, is, of, in, etc.) that appear in almost any text and add little meaning to a frequency analysis. The generator removes them by default so that the cloud shows meaningful vocabulary. You can disable this if you want to include them.
Words with low frequency get small fonts. If your text has many unique words, the cloud limits the maximum to keep large words readable. Increase "Min word length" to filter out short words, or reduce "Max words" to focus on the most common ones.
Yes. The Download button saves the cloud as a PNG. The size matches the canvas dimensions you set (defaults to 800x500 px). For higher resolution, increase the width and height sliders before downloading.
Teal & coral (Gizmoop default), rainbow, monochrome, warm (reds and oranges), and cool (blues and purples). All schemes use accessible color combinations that work on a white background.
The slider goes from 20 to 200 words. Above 200 words, smaller words become illegible. For most texts (essays, blog posts, articles), 60 to 100 words gives a balanced cloud.
Yes, but they are an exploratory tool, not a statistical one. They give a quick visual sense of which words dominate a text. For rigorous frequency analysis, use the underlying counts table below the cloud, or our keyword density tool which gives precise percentages.
They have critics. Word clouds make a strong visual impression but can hide important information: font size is hard to compare precisely, and randomly placed words can be visually misleading. They are best for quick exploration or attention-grabbing graphics, not for serious data presentation.
Any language using Latin characters (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, etc.). The stop word list is English; for other languages, disable stop word removal or paste a clean text. Right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew) and CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) may not display correctly because of the simple regex tokenizer.
The algorithm starts each word at the center of the canvas, then spirals outward checking each position for collision with already-placed words. The first non-colliding position is used. Larger words get placed first (since they need more space), then smaller words fill the gaps. This is the standard approach used by d3-cloud and similar libraries.
Currently the tool only filters by frequency, length, and the built-in stop list. To exclude specific words, edit the input text before pasting (find and remove them using our find-and-replace tool, then paste the cleaned text into the cloud).
Yes. The text you paste, the analysis, and the cloud all run in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to any server. You can verify this in browser developer tools network tab.
The spiral placement introduces a small amount of randomness (rotation, scheme cycling). Two clouds of the same text may have slightly different layouts. The frequency counts are deterministic; only the visual arrangement varies.