How to use it
- Paste text (an essay, survey answers, a speech, song lyrics you wrote) or open a .txt file. Or switch to the word list and type one word per line with its weight: design, 12.
- Choose the look: font, weight, colors, background, rectangle or ellipse, and whether words may turn vertical or tilt. The cloud redraws as you change anything.
- Press New layout for a different arrangement of the same words, or type a seed to get the same arrangement again later. Download a PNG at twice the canvas size, an SVG, or the word counts as a spreadsheet file.
How the words are counted
Words are found with the browser’s built-in word segmentation, which follows the Unicode text segmentation rules, so accented words, Cyrillic, Greek and other scripts count correctly and punctuation never sticks to a word. By default upper and lower case are merged (Design and design are one word), and a list of about 160 very common English words (the, and, of, is, you…) is skipped, because otherwise they dominate every cloud. Words shorter than the minimum length and anything below the minimum count are left out too. The table under the cloud shows the counts, and they can be downloaded.
How the cloud is laid out
The most frequent word is placed first, near the middle. Each word is drawn once off-screen to get its exact shape, letters and rotation included, and then moved outward along a spiral until that shape touches nothing already placed and stays inside the rectangle or ellipse. Because the check uses the real letter shapes rather than boxes around words, small words can tuck into the gaps of larger ones. If the words do not all fit, every size is scaled down by the same factor, so the ranking stays honest, and the status line says by how much; with few words the sizes grow back toward the maximum to fill the space.
Size follows the count. With √ count (the default) a word appearing four times gets twice the font size of a word appearing once, so its area, which grows with the square of the font size, is roughly four times larger. With Count the font size itself is proportional, which exaggerates the top words. Either way, keep in mind that long words take more space than short ones at the same count, so a cloud is a quick impression, not a measurement.
What we tested
On October 15, 2026 we ran the page’s own functions in Chromium. Word counts for 40 random texts (with capitals, punctuation, common words and accented, Greek and Cyrillic words) matched an independent count exactly. We then built 12 clouds of 60 to 200 words in four fonts, both shapes and all three rotation settings, and redrew every placed word alone to compare them pixel by pixel: 1,656 of 1,660 words were placed, no two shared a single pixel, no ink fell outside the canvas or outside the ellipse, the same seed always gave the same cloud, sizes never increased as counts fell, and the SVG had one text element per word. The slowest layout took 1.2 seconds. In Chromium: the sample text gave 28 of 28 words placed with 'design' counted 5 times; New layout moved the words; the 2× PNG came out at 1800 × 1120 px, the SVG held one text element per placed word, the counts CSV opened as word,count rows, and the transparent PNG had a clear corner; a 'word, count' list and an opened .txt file (with the, and, of skipped) were counted correctly; settings survived a reload; the page fitted a 390 px phone with no errors. We also checked the check: switching off the record of occupied space made every cloud overlap and the test fail.
Sources
Checked on .
Frequently Asked Questions
Built by Derek Giordano · Part of Ultimate Design Tools