Tip #23: More ways to create Wordles

If you can't get enough of those arty word clouds Wordle has been creating for you, here are some ways to make creating Wordles easier.

First of all, you might have noticed that Wordle treats each word in a phrase as seperate words, so long as they have a space in between. Suppose you wanted to create a Wordle of things to do when you grow up:

get a job, buy a car, marry someone, become your own boss, live on a golf course, retire early

To us, the commas make sense in that they divide the words into items or phrases. But when we try to create a Wordle by pasting the above text... we get this on the right.

How do we tell Wordle to treat a phrase or a group of words as a single "word" or item? The creator of Wordle says substitute the space between words in a phrase using a tilde mark ~ .

get~a~job, buy~a~car, marry~someone, become~your~own~boss, live~on~a~golf~course, retire~early

Now, let's try to create the Wordle again.

We get what we wanted - a cloud of things to do when you grow up.

"apple" is twice as big as "banana".

Wordle determines the size of each word by the number of times the word appears in your supplied text. Suppose that you created a Wordle using the following text:

apple apple banana

The generated Wordle will have only two words, and the size of the word "apple" will be twice of that of "banana".

Now, instead of typing each word as many times as you need to, there is an easier way. First, click on Advanced on the top menu bar on Wordle's website. You should see "Wordle Advanced!". In the first text box, type:

apple:2
banana:1

See what we are doing here? We are specifying the frequency of each word, i.e. how many times should the word occur. In our example here, we are saying that "apple" occurs 2 times, and "banana" occurs 1 time. Imagine if you have 30 words, and you want some of them to occur many, many times. Instead of typing (or copy and pasting) the words over and over again, just switch to advanced mode and type the frequency instead. The frequency can be thought of the font size of the word.

Once again, the format for keying in your words in advanced mode is:

[word]:[frequency]

that is, type the word, then type a colon sign : , then type a number which is the frequency of the word. Press Enter/Return to move down to the next line to type another word-frequency pair.

Notice that in advanced mode, it is not necessary to seperate words in a phrase with a tilde, because each line consists of only one item. Still, Wordle won't complain if you did use tilde marks.

In advanced mode there is another text box below, which tells you to enter word-frequency-hex colour triples. I won't go into details on what hex colours (hexadecimal colour codes) are now, that would be too much for a single post ;) I may just post that as another tip soon one day.