Wordcloud


A word cloud (also called tag cloud or weighted list) is a visual representation of text data. Words are usually single words, and the importance of each is shown with font size or color. Python fortunately has a wordcloud library allowing to build them.

⏱ Quick start

# Libraries
from wordcloud import WordCloud
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Create a list of word
text=("Python Python Python Matplotlib")

# Create the wordcloud object
wordcloud = WordCloud(width=480, height=480, margin=0).generate(text)

# Display the generated image:
plt.imshow(wordcloud, interpolation='bilinear')
plt.axis("off")
plt.margins(x=0, y=0)
plt.show()

⚠️ The issue with wordclouds

Wordclouds are aesthetically pleasing and people are used to it, what make sure readers will understand them quick.

However, it is important to consider the caveats associated to them. For instance,longer words will take more space on the figure by construction which distorts reality. Moreover, it is impossible to translate a font size to an accurate value.

Wordclouds with.. the wordcloud library 😀

The wordcloud library takes as input a string containing all the words you want to display. It passes it to the Wordcloud() function that will compute the display an show it on the screen thanks to the imshow() function.

Contact


👋 This document is a work by Yan Holtz. You can contribute on github, send me a feedback on twitter or subscribe to the newsletter to know when new examples are published! 🔥