A word cloud is a visual representation of textual data (words or pieces of text). It is a beautiful way to communicate information. You provide the text, either in paragraph or list form, and the software creates a beautiful image, the words that appear more frequently in the source text are usually larger.

There are a number of packages that you can use to create word clouds. One online free tool is Wordle. One major reason to use Wordle is that the images you create are copyright free and you can use them any way you want – even commercially on your website! To quote the Wordle site:

“The images you create with Wordle are yours to use in any way you choose… If you want to give credit to wordle.net, feel free! But it's not required. “

Here is a word cloud the image generated from the above text:

So lets learn how to make Wordle word clouds….