Lorem Ipsum Generator

Placeholder text, in whatever shape you need

Pick a unit and a count, and the text appears. Paragraphs and sentences for prose, list items for a bulleted block, or words when you need an exact count for a fixed-width field.

The HTML option wraps the result in tags ready to paste into a template. The refresh button beside Copy generates another block without changing any settings, so you can fill three columns with three different-looking passages.

Where lorem ipsum comes from

The text is a mangled fragment of Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum, written in 45 BC — a treatise on the theory of ethics. The passage it draws from begins “Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet…”, roughly “there is no one who loves pain itself because it is pain”.

Somewhere in the 1500s a printer setting a type specimen chopped the passage apart and scrambled it, which is where “dolorem ipsum” lost its opening letters and became “lorem ipsum”. The result was Latin-shaped but meaningless — exactly what a specimen sheet needs, since a printer showing off a typeface does not want the customer reading the words.

It survived into Letraset sheets in the 1960s, then into desktop publishing software in the 1980s, and it has been the default filler in design work ever since.

Why nonsense instead of English

Because readable text gets read.

Put real copy in a mockup and the review turns into an argument about the wording. The layout — which is what you asked people to look at — goes unexamined. Meaningless text keeps the conversation on the design.

Put in something too obviously fake, on the other hand, and you lose the point in the other direction. “Content content content” or a row of Xs has none of the variation of real language: every word is the same length, so line breaks fall in unnatural places and the block of text does not look like a block of text.

Lorem ipsum sits between the two. It has roughly the word lengths, letter frequencies and rhythm of Western European prose without saying anything, so the paragraph you are looking at is the right shape and the right texture — a realistic preview of a real paragraph.

The units, and when to use each

Paragraphs for body copy, article layouts and anything where you need to see how a wall of text sits on the page. Each one runs three to six sentences, varying like real paragraphs do.

Sentences for a card description, a meta description mockup, or a summary block — where you need more than a headline and less than an article.

Words when the count matters. Filling a field with a hard limit, checking that a 55-character title truncates properly, or testing what happens to a 300-word summary — this gives you exactly the number you ask for, which paragraphs cannot.

List items for bulleted lists, navigation labels, feature grids and table rows. Each is a short fragment rather than a full sentence, with no trailing period, because that is what a list item actually looks like.

The HTML option

With HTML off you get plain text: paragraphs separated by a blank line, list items one per line. That is what you want for a design tool, a document, or anywhere the blank line is what creates the paragraph break.

With it on, paragraphs come wrapped in <p> tags and list items in a <ul>, ready to paste into a template or a CMS in code view. The result is indented so it stays readable in your editor.

The opening phrase

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit” is the canonical opening, and it is included by default because it is the string people recognize. Its presence is what makes a reviewer register the text as placeholder rather than as bad copy.

That recognizability is also a reason to turn it off. If you are filling six cards in a grid, six blocks all beginning with the same eight words look like a copy-paste error rather than a preview. Untick the option and each block starts differently.

Do not ship it

This is worth saying plainly, because it happens constantly.

Search engines index whatever is live. A page carrying lorem ipsum is a page with no content on it — one that ranks for nothing, and that a quality reviewer would classify as unfinished. Worse, the text has a habit of surviving. National newspapers, banks, university sites and government pages have all published lorem ipsum, sometimes for months, and it is usually found by a member of the public rather than by anyone on the team.

Two habits prevent it. Treat any lorem ipsum still present at launch as a bug with a ticket, not as a note to self. And before going live, search the whole site for “lorem” — it takes seconds and it catches the block everyone forgot about.

When placeholder text is the wrong tool

Lorem ipsum shows you how a layout handles typical text. Most layout problems come from text that is not typical.

A design that looks right at three lines breaks at one, or at eleven. A name field is fine until someone has a very long surname, and a card grid is fine until one title is a single word. Testing with only average-length filler hides all of it.

So when the layout matters, test the extremes too — an empty state, one word, and far more text than you expect. And where the words themselves carry the design decision, as in a navigation bar or a pricing table, write the real ones early. Filler cannot tell you whether a menu label fits, because the label’s length is the thing you are trying to find out.

Frequently asked questions

What is lorem ipsum?

Scrambled Latin used as placeholder text in design work. It comes from a passage of Cicero written in 45 BC, garbled by a printer in the 1500s to make a type specimen, and it has been the default filler in typesetting ever since.

Why use nonsense Latin instead of English?

Because readable text is read. Put real English in a mockup and everyone reviews the copy instead of the layout; put in "content content content" and the word shapes are too uniform to show how the design will actually look. Lorem ipsum has roughly the letter distribution and word lengths of English without meaning anything.

Does it really start with "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet"?

If you leave that option ticked, yes — the canonical opening, punctuated in the usual place. Untick it and the text starts with a random word instead, which is the better choice when you need several blocks that do not all look identical.

Can I get an exact word count?

Yes. Choose Words as the unit and you get precisely that many, which is what a designer filling a fixed-width field or checking a character limit usually needs. Paragraphs and sentences vary in length on purpose, because real ones do.

What does the HTML option do?

Wraps the output in tags ready to paste into a template: paragraphs in <p>, list items in a <ul>. Without it you get plain text with blank lines between paragraphs, which is what you want for a design tool or a document.

Is it safe to publish a page with lorem ipsum on it?

No. Search engines index whatever is live, placeholder or not, and a page of Latin is a page with no useful content on it. It also has a habit of surviving to production — real newspapers, banks and government sites have all shipped it. Treat any lorem ipsum still on a page at launch as a bug.

Is the text random every time?

Yes. Every generation draws fresh words, so two blocks are never identical. Press the refresh button beside Copy to generate another without changing any settings.