Lorem Ipsum Generator

What is lorem ipsum?

Lorem ipsum is placeholder text. You pour it into a layout so you can judge type size, line length, spacing and rag before the real copy exists. It looks like Latin but is scrambled enough to mean nothing, so it fills the space without anyone stopping to read it.

Lorem ipsum generator options

Count

How many units to generate, from 1 to 1,000. Default 3.

Unit

Paragraphs (the default), sentences or words.

Vocabulary

Classic lorem ipsum (the default), or random pseudo-words that are pronounceable but not Latin at all.

Start with Lorem ipsum

On by default, so the text opens with "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet". Turn it off when you don't want that giveaway first line. It does nothing to pseudo-words.

Sentence length

Short is 4 to 8 words, medium (the default) 8 to 14, long 14 to 24.

Paragraph length

Short is 2 to 3 sentences, medium (the default) 4 to 6, long 7 to 10. Only used when the unit is paragraphs.

Max words

Optional. Cuts the finished text to this many words, at a word boundary.

Max characters

Optional. Cuts the finished text to this many characters, also at a word boundary, which is what you want for a field with a hard limit like a meta description or a card excerpt.

Seed

Optional. Leave it empty and every run gives different text. Set it, and the same seed with the same options returns the same text every time, which suits screenshots and test fixtures.

Why use lorem ipsum instead of real copy

Typing asdf asdf gives you the wrong texture. Lines break according to word lengths, and gibberish has the wrong mix of them, so your line breaks and rag lie to you. Lorem ipsum's word lengths are close enough to English that the layout behaves roughly the way it will with real copy.

Pasting in a real article causes the opposite problem: people read it. The review turns into an argument about the words instead of the type, and copy that happens to read well can hide a layout that doesn't work.

It's also a shared signal. "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" tells everyone looking at the file that the copy is temporary, with no note in the margin needed.

Lorem ipsum alternatives

Descriptive placeholders like "About us intro goes here" beat lorem ipsum in early wireframes, where the question is what goes where rather than how it looks.

Writing the real copy first sits at the other end. The layout then fits the content instead of the content being squeezed in afterwards. It costs more up front and is usually worth it on short, high-stakes pages.

Themed generators such as Hipster Ipsum, Bacon Ipsum and Cat Ipsum are readable English, so they pull attention the way a real article does. The pseudo-word option here covers the case where Latin is itself the distraction, either because reviewers read it as a bug or because the design isn't in a Latin idiom.

Things to know about lorem ipsum

The source is real Cicero: the scrambled words come from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (On the Ends of Good and Evil), written in 45 BC. Even the famous first line is a fragment, since "lorem ipsum" is a chopped "dolorem ipsum", meaning "pain itself".

Printers were doing this long before computers, with scrambled Latin filler going back to the 1500s. It reached desktop publishing through Aldus PageMaker in the 1980s. Some designers still argue you should never lay out with dummy text, since a design that only holds up with well-behaved filler doesn't really hold up.