Wordle Guide

When to use Wordle

A "Wordle" enables you to see how frequently words appear in a given text, or see the relationship between a column of words and a column of numbers. You can tweak your word "clouds" with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

The size of a word is proportional to the quantity associated with that word, which, in the case of free text, is the word count. For instance, if your text consists of the words "apple apple apple banana banana papaya", then "banana" will appear in a font size twice that of "papaya", and "apple" will appear in a font size 3/2 as large as "banana".

How Wordle works

Wordle draws each word at a size proportional to its frequency. By default, the visualization treats different letter cases ("Hello" vs. "hello") as different words and filters out common words (such as "the"). The "Language" menu lets you adjust these settings.

If you choose to use the two-column format, Wordle interprets the text column as words, and the numeric column as word frequency.

In free text, you can use either the Unicode "non-breaking space" character, \u00A0, or the tilde character ~ between words that you wish to keep together. The tilde will be converted to a space when drawing the words, and the words will be treated as a single word when counting.

Expert Notes

Wordle was first published by Jonathan Feinberg on wordle.net. It was designed to give pleasure, and not to provide reliable analytic insight. That said, many people have found unexpected uses for it, from presenting the "gist" of a text to displaying personal identity.

The layout algorithm differs from most other word clouds (including the Many Eyes tag cloud) in its efficient use of typographical space. An entire tiny word may appear inside the letter O of a big word, for example.