ABCcount

Word cloud generator

Paste anything and see which words you actually lean on. The counter tells you how many words you wrote; this tells you which ones you kept reaching for.

0 words · 0 distinct · nothing leaves your browser

Paste some text above and the words you lean on will appear here.

What this is actually useful for

Looking at your own writing, mostly. You cannot see your own repetitions — you chose every word deliberately, so none of them feels repeated to you. A cloud makes the pattern visible in about two seconds.

The word you did not know you love

Everybody has one. It appears eleven times in four pages and you will not have noticed a single one of them. It is usually an adverb.

Whether the essay is about what you think

If the subject of your argument is not near the top, either the writing has drifted or the argument is thinner than the plan was.

Reading a transcript quickly

An hour of interview becomes a shape you can take in at a glance — which is not analysis, but it tells you where to read properly.

Comparing two drafts

Run each and look at what changed near the top. A revision that was meant to sharpen the focus and did not will show it here before you can feel it.

And what they are genuinely bad at

Presenting findings to other people. This is a real and well-earned criticism, and it is worth knowing before you put one in a report.

Comparing sizes by eye is unreliable, longer words occupy more space and therefore look more important than they are, and position carries no meaning whatever however much it looks like it does. A bar chart of the top ten beats a cloud at every analytical task — which is why there is a ranked list underneath this one.

Use the cloud to notice something. Use the list to say something.

Why “the” is hidden by default

Because it would be the largest word in every cloud ever made. The, and, of, to and a are the five most common words in written English by an enormous margin, and a cloud showing them is a cloud that describes English rather than your text.

Around 170 of these — the usual stop-word list — are filtered out unless you untick the box. Worth unticking occasionally: an unusual ratio of I to we, or a lot of would and might, says something about a piece of writing that the filtered version hides.

For counting rather than ranking, the word counter is free and unlimited. If the cloud showed you a word you use too often, the paraphraser is the fastest way to vary it, and cutting word count covers the structural version of the same problem.

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