How to remove words from a word cloud

Almost every word cloud picks up words that add nothing: the survey question repeated in every answer, your own brand name, filler such as "honestly" or "literally". In WordCloud+ you remove a word by adding it to the project's stop words. A stop word is left out when the text is counted, so it disappears from the cloud and from the ranked list on the Summary tab.

Editing stop words needs a free account. The guest preview on Create a word cloud is read-only, so choose Unlock editing first and your draft becomes a project you can change.

Remove a word straight from the cloud

This is the quickest way to deal with one or two words you spot while looking at the cloud.

1. Open the project on the Cloud tab.
2. Click the word you want to remove. A panel opens with the word as its title and four tabs: Edit, References, Analysis and Coding.
3. On the Edit tab, find the Stop Words section. It lists each word of the term with a switch beside it.
4. Turn the switch on. The word is saved to the project's stop words straight away and the cloud is redrawn without it.

If you click a phrase such as "super friendly staff", the panel lists "super", "friendly" and "staff" separately, so you can switch off just the filler word. The longer phrase then drops out, because a phrase can never start or end with a stop word, but "friendly staff" will still appear if it occurs at least twice in your text.

The same panel opens from the Summary tab: choose Examine on any row of the ranked list. That is handy for words too small to click in the cloud.

Remove many words at once with the Stop Words tab

1. Open the Stop Words tab. The box holds the project's full list, one word per line. It starts with the default list for the project's language.
2. Add your own words at the end, one per line.
3. Select Update. You will see "Stop words updated", and the cloud and the Summary are recalculated.

A few details decide whether an entry matches:

• Use lower case. WordCloud+ lower-cases your text before counting it, so "Acme" in the list will not match anything, while "acme" will.
• One word per entry. The box splits on spaces as well as line breaks, so typing "customer service" adds "customer" and "service" as two separate stop words. To hide a whole phrase but keep its words elsewhere, use the Replace tab instead, as described in How to combine and rename words in a word cloud.
• Match the spelling exactly. Apostrophes count, and a straight apostrophe is a different character from a curly one, so "don't" and "don’t" are separate entries. Add both if your text mixes them.
• Leave out punctuation. Before counting, straight double quotes ("), brackets, colons, semicolons and underscores are removed, and the text is split at commas, full stops, question marks and exclamation marks. A stop word never needs any of those characters.

How stop words affect phrases

WordCloud+ counts phrases of up to four words as well as single words, and stop words shape those phrases too. A phrase cannot start or end with a stop word, and a two-word phrase cannot contain one at all. Three- and four-word phrases may include stop words in the middle, up to the limit set under Allowed Stop Words on the Settings tab. That is why "proof of concept" can appear in a cloud while "of" on its own never does.

So adding a word to the list can also remove, or shorten, phrases that contain it. Word clouds with phrases, not just single words explains the phrase rules in full.

Changing the language resets the list

The Language setting on the Settings tab chooses which default list the project starts from. Changing it replaces the whole list with the defaults for the new language, and any words you added are lost. If you need to switch, copy your additions from the Stop Words tab first and paste them back afterwards. Making a word cloud in another language covers the language options.

Put a word back

Delete the word's line in the Stop Words tab and select Update. If a phrase containing the word is still visible in the cloud, you can instead click that phrase and turn the word's switch off on the Edit tab.

Other ways to tidy a cloud

• Show fewer terms. The term count button in the Cloud toolbar sets the Maximum term count, from 2 to 200 (50 by default). Lowering it hides the smallest terms without removing anything from the analysis.
• Merge variants. Fold "customers" into "customer", or "colour" into "color", with the Replace tab.
• Fix the source. On the Text tab, select Edit to change the text itself, for example to delete a question that was pasted in with every answer, then select Update.

Ready to try it on your own text? Create a word cloud and open the full editor when you want to start removing words.