How to make a word cloud from text

A word cloud shows the words that appear most often in a text, with bigger words for higher counts. It is quick to make, but a few choices decide whether it is useful or just decoration.

By 孤獨的時空旅人 · Updated 2026-10-16

What a word cloud shows

Size reflects how many times a word appears, not how important it is. That makes word clouds good for a first look at survey answers, reviews, speeches or lyrics, and poor for proving a point. Treat the cloud as a prompt to read the text more closely.

Prepare your text

Paste only the text you want counted. Remove headers, signatures and repeated boilerplate that would dominate the cloud. Common words such as “the”, “and” or “of” are skipped by default, and you can add your own words to leave out, such as the product name that appears in every review.

Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai

These languages are written without spaces between words, so the text must be split first. The tool uses your browser's built-in word segmenter, which works well for everyday text but can split names or new words oddly. Check the list of top words under the cloud and add unwanted fragments to the exclusion box.

Design choices

Use 30 to 80 words: fewer looks empty, more becomes unreadable. Pick a high-contrast colour theme and a plain or transparent background if you will place the image on a slide. Words that do not fit are left out, so lower the maximum number of words or choose the square canvas if many are missing.

Privacy and use

The counting and drawing happen in your browser, so private text such as survey answers is not uploaded. Download the PNG for slides, posters or social posts, and keep the original text if you need to regenerate it.

Tools used in this guide

Word Cloud GeneratorTurn text into a word cloud imageWord CounterCount characters, words and linesChinese ConverterSimplified ⇄ Traditional ChineseCSV to ExcelConvert CSV to an .xlsx file

Frequently asked questions

Does a bigger word mean it is more important?

No. It only means it appears more often in the text you pasted.

How many words should I show?

Between 30 and 80 is a good range for most texts.

Why do some Chinese words look split in the wrong place?

The browser's word splitting is automatic. Add unwanted fragments to the exclusion box and regenerate.

Is my text uploaded?

No. Everything runs in your browser.

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