What a phrase cloud shows
A normal word cloud counts single words. A phrase cloud counts runs of adjacent words, called n-grams: two-word runs are bigrams and three-word runs are trigrams. That keeps meaning together. In customer feedback, support tells you little, but customer support, slow delivery and pricing page tell you what people were actually talking about.
The generator above is loaded with a short passage in which a few phrases repeat. It is set to count two-word phrases that appear at least twice. Change the “Count” menu to compare the options.
The four counting modes
- Single words: the normal word cloud.
- Two-word phrases: every pair of neighbouring words, such as machine learning.
- Three-word phrases: every run of three, such as point of view.
- Words and two-word phrases: both in one cloud. Because a phrase contains words that are also counted alone, machine, learning and machine learning can all appear.
The exact rules
- The text is split into segments at every full stop, question or exclamation mark, comma, semicolon, colon, bracket, quotation mark and line break. A phrase never crosses one of those, so the last word of one sentence is not joined to the first word of the next.
- Within a segment, every window of 2 (or 3) neighbouring words is a candidate phrase.
- A phrase cannot start or end with a filler word from the chosen language, a word shorter than the minimum length, or a word in the exclusion box. So of the and the model are skipped, while point of view is allowed because of sits in the middle.
- Phrases are lower-cased and counted exactly. Machine Learning and machine learning are one phrase.
- Phrases that occur fewer times than the minimum count are dropped. Switching to a phrase mode sets the minimum to 2, because with a minimum of 1 almost every pair appears once and the cloud is noise.
In the example passage, a minimum of 1 would produce 33 different two-word phrases, nearly all appearing once. A minimum of 2 leaves 6.
Worked example
These counts come from the passage loaded in the tool, computed with the tool’s own code:
| Two-word phrases (at least 2) | Count | Single words (at least 2) | Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| climate change | 4 | data | 5 |
| machine learning | 3 | climate | 4 |
| good data | 3 | change | 4 |
| renewable energy | 3 | machine | 3 |
| careful cleaning | 2 | learning | 3 |
| data quality | 2 | good | 3 |
| renewable | 3 | ||
| energy | 3 |
The three-word list is empty at a minimum count of 2, which is typical: three-word phrases repeat rarely, so use them only with long texts. In the mixed mode, the top of the list is data (5), climate (4), climate change (4), change (4).
When phrases help, and when they do not
- Good for: product reviews, support tickets, survey comments, interview notes, and any text where short repeated expressions carry the topic.
- Poor for: short texts. A phrase has to repeat to show up, so you need a few hundred words, or dozens of separate responses, before a phrase cloud means anything.
- No grammar knowledge: the tool does not know what a noun phrase is. learning models and learning model are separate phrases, and a pair that crosses a clause without punctuation can look odd. Check the frequency table.
- One line per response: for survey answers, put each response on its own line so no phrase can join the end of one answer to the start of the next.
For a full walk-through of preparing responses, see the survey word cloud page. The general rules for counting are on text to word cloud.
More word cloud tools and guides
- Word cloud generator
- How to make a word cloud
- Text to word cloud
- Word cloud shapes
- Survey word clouds
Frequently asked questions
- What is a phrase cloud?
- A word cloud built from short runs of adjacent words, such as two-word phrases, instead of single words. The more often a phrase appears, the larger it is drawn.
- How do I make a phrase cloud?
- Paste your text, set “Count” to Two-word phrases or Three-word phrases, and press Generate. Keep the minimum count at 2 or higher unless you have very little text.
- Why is my phrase cloud empty?
- Phrases must repeat to reach the minimum count. If your text is short, set the minimum count to 1, or paste more text.
- Can I get longer phrases than three words?
- No. The tool counts two-word and three-word phrases. Longer repeated phrases are rare in ordinary text.
- Do phrases cross sentences?
- No. Phrases stop at full stops, commas, brackets, quotation marks and line breaks.