As someone who makes a living out of words, I’ve been intrigued to see the growing popularity of so-called “word clouds” over the past couple of years. A word cloud is a graphical representation of the words used in a chunk of text – a website, an article, the Koran, whatever – with varying text sizes representing the frequency with which words are used. It’s a cute way to analyse your idiolect, your own personal variant of the language you speak (or rather write). You’ll often find verbal tics you didn’t even realise you had. Gosh, do I really use “really” so often? Really? Really and truly?
I’ve even seen word clouds touted as an SEO (search engine optimisation) tool for checking keyword density – a bit of a gimmick, that one.
But I’ve never really bought the notion of word clouds as a kind of randomised text art – until now. Worldle is a brilliant, habit-forming web tool that produces word clouds that are simply lovely to look at. You can enter any string of text, or the URL of any website with an RSS feed, and it will spit out a lovely picture like the one below [click to see the full size], which you can customise to your heart’s content with a jaw-dropping selection of fonts, colours and layouts.
