How to Navigate the Interface

To move between State of the Union addresses, click or drag on the graph below the word cloud; the president who delivered each address and the date of delivery will appear at the top of the screen and below the cursor.

You can also use the right and left arrow keys to move one year at a time.

Click on a word (or drag to a word and lift on touch screens) to view the full State of the Union address in the window to the right; the selected word will be highlighted.

Words automatically move to avoid overlapping.

Icons

Icons below the Timeline indicate the distribution of the address:

Word Statistics

Mouse over individual words (or drag over words on touch screens) to get more data on the word. Lift your finger on a word to see it in context:

Frequency in text

the number of times the word appears in this address.

Per 10k in text

at the current frequency, how many times the word would occur per ten thousand words.

Per 10k in corpus

at the average frequency of the word in all addresses, how many times the word would occur per ten thousand words.

Document frequency

the number of documents that the word appears in (out of 240 as of 2025).

Relative frequency

is a measure of how unique the usage of the word is on a scale of 100; if one president uses a word often, that other presidents do not use so often, it is likely to be important.

Average position

if 0 is the first word and 100 the last; low numbers mean the word tends to come at the beginning, high numbers the end (numbers near 50 could mean the middle or even distribution).

Search

Use the search to mine all the State of the Union addresses for occurrences of specific words (use quotes to search for phrases such as "United States").