Lorem Ipsum generator

How to use it

1. Set the amount and pick the unit — paragraphs, sentences or words.
2. Leave “Start with Lorem ipsum…” ticked for the traditional opening, or untick it for fully random filler.
3. Hit Generate, then Copy.

The words are a mangled passage of Cicero from 45 BC

The filler is not nonsense invented for the purpose. It is a corrupted extract from Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, and lorem itself is the broken tail of dolorem in the line neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet - roughly, no one loves pain simply because it is pain. Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden-Sydney College, traced the source in the 1980s.

A sixteenth-century printer scrambled a galley of it into a type specimen, and the scramble outlived the book: onto Letraset transfer sheets in the 1960s, into desktop publishing software in the 1980s, and from there into every design tool since. The term greeking - text set to be looked at rather than read - comes from the older phrase about something being all Greek.

Filler that balances beautifully can break under English copy

Latin and English do not distribute the same way. Lorem Ipsum’s words run longer, its endings cluster on -um, -is and -at, and it barely touches k, w, y or z - so a measure that looks even in placeholder turns ragged under real English, where short function words like the, of and a break the rhythm. A heading box sized around two long Latin words overflows the moment a real product name lands in it.

The deeper cost is time. Every week a layout stays filled is a week the content questions are deferred, and those questions - how long the headline really is, whether the paragraph needs to exist - decide the design more than the grid does. Placeholder should never ship, though it repeatedly has, surfacing on published pages and in print. Grepping a build for lorem before launch takes seconds.

Questions