Create Word Clouds With TagCloud or Wordle

Posted on August 8, 2008

Fun tools called Wordle and TagCrowd allow you to create a word cloud for any text document you provide. You can also provide an URL to an article or webpage and these two tools will make a word cloud for it. On the right is a word cloud for the IWJ that TagCrowd created.

Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

One interesting use of the Wordle tool was a comparison of John McCain and Barack Obama speeches that was posted here. You can see a gallery of other Wordles here.

Maybe Wordle or TagCrowd could be helpful for checking your short story or essay to see if you are using the same word too often.

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