Lorem Ipsum Generator

Where lorem ipsum comes from

Lorem ipsum is not random. It is a mangled excerpt from De finibus bonorum et malorum — “On the Ends of Good and Evil” — a treatise on ethics that Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote in 45 BC. The source is Book 1, sections 32 and 33, where the original reads “Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit…”: roughly, nor is there anyone who loves pain for its own sake, simply because it is pain.

The placeholder version cuts into that sentence mid-word. “Lorem” is the back half of “dolorem”, pain, and from there words are shortened, swapped and altered: Cicero's “adipisci” becomes “adipiscing”, and “eiusmod tempor incididunt” is a scramble of “eius modi tempora incidunt”. The result looks like Latin and is not. A Latin reader recognises fragments, but there is no sentence to follow — which is the point.

The link to Cicero was traced by Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who followed the unusual word “consectetur” back through classical literature. How printers came to use the text is less certain. The often-repeated claim that it has been the industry's dummy text since the 1500s has no surviving sixteenth-century example behind it. What can be shown is that it was in use by the 1960s, when Letraset sold it on dry-transfer lettering sheets, and that desktop-publishing software such as Aldus PageMaker carried it onto computers in the 1980s.

Why designers fill layouts with fake Latin

Placeholder text exists so a layout can be judged as a layout. Put real copy in a draft and reviewers read it: they argue about the wording of a headline when the question was whether the column is too wide. Text that cannot be read moves attention to what it is there to test — line length, rhythm, the weight of a block of type on the page, how a card copes with three lines instead of two.

Lorem ipsum does that job because it has roughly the texture of a European language: a believable mix of short and long words, ordinary letter shapes, sentences of plausible length. Repeating “text text text” or “xxxx xxxx” does not, because identical words set an unnaturally even grey and hide the ragged edges real copy will produce.

It also has blind spots worth knowing. The classic passage contains no j, k, w, y or z, so it will never show you how those letters look in your typeface — and w and y are common in English. It has no accented letters, none of the very long compound words that German and Finnish produce, and nothing in any script other than Latin. If a layout must handle Hindi, Arabic or Chinese, test it with real text in those scripts; lorem ipsum tells you nothing about them.

When placeholder text causes trouble

The most common lorem ipsum failure is the one that ships. A paragraph left in a template, a product description nobody replaced, an image's alt text still in Latin: search engines index it and readers notice. Before anything goes live, search the whole project for “lorem” and “ipsum”.

The subtler failure is designing around text that will never exist. Real headlines run longer than two words, real names do not fit a twelve-character box, and real product descriptions arrive at four times the length of the slot drawn for them. Where you can, design with real or realistic copy, and keep placeholder text for the parts that genuinely have none yet.

Two further cautions. Screen readers will try to read lorem ipsum aloud as though it were English, so a prototype being tested with assistive-technology users should carry real words. And participants in a usability test who are shown a mockup full of Latin cannot tell you whether the content makes sense — only whether it looks tidy.

Getting exactly the text you need

Paragraphs come out with three to eight sentences, averaging five, and sentences run from four to twenty-two words with the occasional comma. A typical paragraph is 30 to 85 words, about 55 on average — close to the shape of ordinary prose, so paragraph heights vary as they would with real content. Ask for words and you get exactly that many, closed off as sentences, which is the mode to use when a field has a known length.

Sentences mode gives a single paragraph of as many sentences as you ask for. List items gives short phrases of two to seven words, one per line. Turn on HTML and paragraphs are wrapped in <p> tags, while list items become a <ul> of <li> elements, ready to paste into a page or a CMS's code view.

The counter beside the buttons shows the words and characters you are about to copy, which helps when a design sets a limit: a 160-character meta description, a card that holds about 30 words. With HTML on it gives the character count both with and without the tags.

The text is built from the words of the standard passage, chosen at random but weighted the way they occur in it, and never with the same word twice in a row. Within a visit the text holds still: change the count and paragraphs are added or removed at the end rather than everything above being reshuffled, and switching HTML or the opening sentence on and off leaves the rest untouched. Press New text when you want a different arrangement.