TextStock — every word and phrase related to any word.
A thesaurus gives you eight synonyms. Type a word into TextStock and you get fifty-nine readings of it: the idioms it lives inside, the words that sit either side of it in real sentences, what it means to a five-year-old and to a postgraduate, how it lands in South Asia against Africa, its colours, its captions, the feelings attached to it. A few hundred words and phrases, and a silhouette that means the word. The picture TextStock builds from them is what you do with them.
Type a word, and this is what comes back.
Take one word — peace. A dictionary gives you a definition. A thesaurus gives you calm, harmony, quiet. Here you also get shanti, aman and sukoon, because that is what it is called in South Asia; uhuru and amani, because that is what it is called across much of Africa; hug and soft bed from a five-year-old; conflict resolution from a postgraduate; white dove, calm sea and open door from the metaphors; and the phrases it actually appears inside — peace treaty, peace of mind, peace lily. Then a silhouette of a dove, chosen because it means peace.
No reference book does that. The Oxford Collocations Dictionary is the deepest thing in this space and it stops at about 9,000 headwords, collocations only — no idioms beside them, no picture, no captions. Dictionaries give sense and etymology. The newer AI word cloud tools will invent a word list from a topic, but their own documentation promises only "a list of words" and says nothing about phrases, nothing about who the words are for, nothing about how sizes are decided. And not one dictionary in existence grades a word by the age of the reader or by where they are reading it from.
The sizes work differently too, and this is the part worth knowing. There is no document here to count, so nothing is sized by how often it occurred. A word prints big when several of the fifty-nine readings arrive at it independently — when the child's view and the postgraduate's view and the metaphors and the South Asian reading all land on memory, memory gets the large type. Size is agreement between viewpoints, not frequency.
Picture the wall behind a school reception. Or your slide, halfway through a pitch. Or the card you are signing for someone leaving after eleven years. You have one idea to carry the whole surface, and a tidy list of words in a box will not carry it for you.
Open the studio and type that idea as one word: ocean, kindness, your brand's name. You get back the words that fit it — 500 by default, and you can dial that down to 30 for something sparse — each sized by how well it fits, poured into a shape you choose. Themes other people have already used open the instant you click them. Type one nobody has used yet and it takes a few seconds to gather, then it is saved, so it opens instantly for everyone after that.
The five sections below answer four questions: what decides the sizes, why the shape does half the work, how the words change for your reader, and what you actually get when you download. There is a quiz at the end if you want to check you picked it up.
What happens when you type a theme
You start every cloud with one theme word, and that word does more work than you expect. Your theme decides which words get gathered, the size each one earns, and which shape and colours you see first. Choose it the way a photographer chooses where to stand: your one decision that everything else hangs off.
Themes other people have already used open the instant you click them. Type one nobody has used yet and the studio goes off to gather your words, which takes a few seconds, then keeps them, so the next person gets them instantly.
Either way you land on a finished cloud, not an empty canvas: a shape picked to suit your theme, a palette that will print on white, and your words already placed. Everything after that is a swap. Change the shape, the colours, the words, the reader you are aiming at. Your theme stays where you put it.
What decides how big a word prints
So who decided that brave should print bigger than risk? Nobody sized these by eye. Every word gets a score for how strongly it belongs to your theme, and that score becomes its print size. The biggest word on your cloud is simply the word that scored highest.
You may distrust that the first time you read it, and fairly: something you cannot see is deciding what your reader notices first. So we show you the working. Hover any word below and its score appears. Disagree with one? Type your own number in the studio and yours wins.
Here is Courage, straight from the studio.
Why the shape does half the work
Most word cloud tools hand you a rectangle. Here your words fill a shape you choose, and your reader catches that outline from across the room, several seconds before they are close enough to read a single word. Put courage inside a lion and you have told them your subject twice.
So give the shape a minute of your time. A teacher printing kindness for a corridor wall reaches for a heart. A coach printing the season reaches for the county outline. A brand team drops in their own logo and lets the words pour into it. Same engine, three completely different objects.
Every theme arrives with a shape already picked, and you can swap it for four other things:
- A shape from our library. Found by meaning, not by spelling, so searching car gets you a car and never care.
- An emoji. In four drawing styles, because Twitter, Google and Microsoft each draw the same emoji differently.
- A word or a year. Set in heavy type, so your letters become the boundary. Short and chunky works best: initials, a grade, 2026.
- Your own photo. Your browser strips the background, so your picture never leaves your device. Head and shoulders works best.
Who is the cloud for?
Before you pick anything else, ask yourself one question: who is going to be standing in front of this? Your courage cloud for a classroom of nine-year-olds needs different words from your courage cloud for a boardroom wall. Same theme, different room, different vocabulary.
Pick your reader and the word list is rebuilt for them. The theme stays where it is:
What you can change after it's made
Treat what the studio hands you as a first draft, the way a photographer treats the first frame. Click any word to move it, turn it, resize it up to 320%, recolour it, rename it or delete it. Lock a palette of your own colours, or let your shape lend its colours to the words, down to individual letters. Hover a word and it lifts out so you can see where it came from.
Renaming is the one you will find last and use most. Select designer, type Shaleen Gupta, and your cloud is suddenly about a person instead of a job.
Then download it. There are four formats:
| Format | Best for |
|---|---|
| PNG, transparent background | Slides and posters, or anything sitting on a coloured page |
| JPEG | Quick sharing, where a white background is fine |
| SVG | Print. It is vector, so it holds up at any size |
| Animated web page | Embedding online, where the words react to the pointer |
Fresh from the gallery
Clouds people have made and saved. Click one to open it in the studio, where you can change anything about it.
Which cloud works harder?
Five rounds. Each shows you the same theme drawn two ways — pick the one you think reads better, and you get the reason either way. Fair warning: almost everyone loses the pale-colours round.
The TextStock glossary
Six words worth knowing, so you can say what is wrong with a cloud instead of only feeling it. Tap a card to flip it.
Questions you actually ask
Read the cloud
Ten questions in seven formats: multiple choice, multiple correct, fill in the blank, match, put in order, read-think-connect, and write your own. Each question has three levels of help if you want them. A hint first, then the reasoning, then a wider connection.
Start with a theme
That is the whole of it. Sizes come from fit, the shape carries as much as the words do, and the vocabulary follows whoever is standing in front of it. Everything else is yours to move. So — what are you going to put on that wall?
Where this connects
What do you want a word cloud about?
Type a theme — a feeling, a topic, your brand. You'll get a cloud of the words that fit it, in a shape.
Ready-made themes are instant and free. A new theme takes a few seconds — then it's saved to use again.
These are the words that fit your theme, biggest first. Change who it's for to re-tune them, then Make it.