Lorem ipsum generator

What lorem ipsum actually is

It is Cicero, damaged. The passage underneath it is De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum — On the Ends of Good and Evil — book one, sections 10.32 and 10.33, written in 45 BC. The original runs Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit: there is nobody who loves pain itself, who seeks it out and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.

Lorem is not a word in any language. It is the back half of dolorem with the first syllable cut off, which is the tell that this began as a printer’s type specimen rather than as anything meant to be read. The usual account has a compositor scrambling a galley of Cicero in the sixteenth century to show off a typeface, though that story has no documentary support behind it; the oldest copies anyone can point to are the Letraset dry-transfer sheets of the 1960s. The trail back to De Finibus was picked up before 1982 by Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden-Sydney College, who followed consectetur — a word rare enough that a concordance runs out of candidates almost at once — home to its source, and published the finding in 1994.

The damage runs through the whole passage, not only the opening. Eiusmod is Cicero’s eius modi run together; ullamco is what is left of ullam corporis; occaecat was obcaecati, irure was iure, cupidatat was cupiditate, and mollit anim was mollitia animi. The odd-looking words are not later inventions sitting beside a genuine opening — they are the same Latin, truncated or run into the word next to it. The pool this page draws from carries both forms of eleven such pairs, so a long enough draw will put obcaecati and occaecat in the same passage.

Why designers reach for it

A layout is a shape before it is a message, and grey text of roughly the right length in roughly the right place answers most of what a first draft has to answer: whether the measure is comfortable, whether the leading is right, whether the hierarchy reads at three sizes. The second reason is political rather than typographic. Show a layout set in English and the review becomes a review of the copy inside thirty seconds; set it in Latin and the spacing question you called the meeting about is the one that gets asked.

The argument against it, which is a good one

Placeholder text hides content problems, and lorem ipsum hides them better than most, because it is the most even body text that has ever existed. There are no proper nouns in it, no numbers, no capitals mid-sentence, no acronyms, no links. Real copy has all of that, so a layout signed off on lipsum has been tested against the one input it is guaranteed never to receive.

• Headings. A placeholder heading is exactly as long as you made it. A real one is either “Pricing” or “How we cut onboarding from eleven days to two”, and both have to work in the same slot.
• The short strings. Buttons, nav labels, empty states, error messages. Nobody fills a button with Latin, so nobody finds out until late that the button and the paragraph beside it do not balance.
• Anything with a name in it. Client names, product names, URLs and email addresses do not break where Latin breaks, and an unbreakable thirty-character string is what actually blows a column open.

The general form is the part worth keeping: a design that only works with even grey text is a design that has not been tested.

When to set the real words instead

Use placeholder where length is the only thing that matters, and real words everywhere the words are the point — the headline, the subhead, the button, the nav labels, the pricing table, the empty state, the errors. If the copy does not exist yet, write a bad draft anyway: a clumsy real headline tells you more about a layout in five seconds than a perfect Latin one tells you in an hour, because it carries the actual proper noun that has to fit.

A note on length, because Latin does not measure like English

The word pool this page draws from averages 6.4 characters a word, and the text it produces comes out at about the same. Ordinary English running text sits closer to five, because a large slice of it is the, of, and, to, is and a — the short connectives Latin mostly does without, having inflection instead. The same number of words is therefore not the same amount of space: set 300 of each into one column and the Latin runs noticeably longer.

That catches people both ways. Match by word count and a box sized to the Latin carries slack you cannot see, so the design reads tight in review and loose once the English lands. Match by eye and you have sized it for six-character words with nothing unbreakable in them, and the first real product name or URL to arrive is what overflows it. Match on characters instead, which is why the line under the box counts them, then check the layout at the shortest thing anyone will plausibly write and at a third longer than the longest.

Everything here runs in the page

The text is assembled in your browser from a fixed Latin word list, with no server in the path — which is why changing the count answers instantly instead of reloading, and why the page keeps working with the network switched off. Every run is a fresh draw, so two people asking for five paragraphs do not get the same five. The rest of the free tools here work the same way.