In the second post of a series about top linguistic sites, we will examine the artistic word site “Wordle.”

A lot of word-oriented sites are all about information, but Wordle is oriented towards creation.

Perhaps you don’t recognize the name, but if you use the Web regularly, you may have already run into some of Wordle’s “word clouds.” As the homepage explains, “clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.”

This is best visualized, so here is an example based on the last five posts to our translation blog.

Well, when I look at this Wordle, I see it’s certainly clear I’m using the key words “translation” and “language” enough!

However, I think we can also safely say that I am no Wordle artist. Some users tweak texts in all sorts of ways: “weighting” words, eliminating others, playing endlessly with colors and layout to end up with fascinatingly artistic creations.

These three recent works caught my eye: Summer Reading, 60s Music and Portland, OR.

And these “Wordles” – along with scores of other creations — were added within 30 minutes of my “Language Translation” word cloud, so the site is clearly popular.

Created by IBM employee Jonathan Feinberg, the site is not entirely user-friendly. For example, you cannot simply copy and paste your Wordle; you must communicate it either through html code or with a screenshot.

But whatever Wordle’s limits, it’s sure a lot of fun.

Betty Carlson