Lorem Ipsum Generator

What lorem ipsum is

Lorem ipsum is placeholder text: Latin-looking words that fill a page while the real copy is still being written. Designers, developers and printers use it to see how a layout, a font or a template works with text in it. Because nobody can read it, people look at the design instead of the words, and nobody mistakes it for final copy. It is also called dummy text or filler text.

This generator can start every text with the familiar opening line, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit", and then continues with sentences built from the same kind of Latin-looking words.

Where lorem ipsum comes from

Lorem ipsum is not random. It is a scrambled piece of a Latin text by the Roman statesman Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum. The connection was found by Richard McClintock, who directed the publications office of Hampden-Sydney College for many years. According to the classics department of the University of Virginia, he discovered that the printer's dummy text derives from the Loeb edition of Cicero's work.

You can see the link in book 1, section 32 of the original, where Cicero writes "qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit, amet, consectetur, adipisci velit". Compare it with the placeholder and you can see what changed: dolorem lost its first two letters and became lorem, which is not a Latin word at all, quia disappeared and adipisci turned into adipiscing. That is why lorem ipsum reads like a language without saying anything.

Paragraphs, sentences, words or bytes

Pick the unit that matches what you are filling. Every number you see in the counts below the text is exact, so you can rely on it when you test a word limit or a field size.

Paragraph length changes how many sentences each paragraph has: short paragraphs have 2 to 4, medium 4 to 7 and long 7 to 10. Use short paragraphs for cards and teasers and long ones to fill an article page. You can create up to 100 paragraphs, 500 sentences, 10,000 words or 100,000 bytes at once.

Bytes are the most precise option. The text uses only plain ASCII letters, spaces, commas and periods, which take one byte each in UTF-8, so 255 bytes means 255 characters. Instead of cutting a word in half, the generator finishes with one or two words of exactly the right length and a period. That makes it useful for testing a database column, a form field or an API with a size limit, both at the limit and one byte above it.

Plain text, HTML paragraphs or an HTML list

Plain text separates paragraphs with a blank line, which pastes cleanly into design tools, word processors and content management systems. The two HTML formats give you markup you can drop straight into a page or a template:

In the list format every paragraph becomes one list item. To fill a navigation menu or a bullet list with shorter items, choose sentences instead of paragraphs: then every sentence is its own <li>. Bytes always come as plain text, so the size stays exact.

The same text again, with a link

The text is not random each time you open the page. It comes from a seed, a short code stored in the link together with your settings. Copy the link, and anyone who opens it sees exactly the same text, which helps when a design review or a bug report refers to a specific line. Asking for more paragraphs keeps the ones you already have and adds new ones at the end. New text picks a fresh seed and gives you different words.

Tips for working with placeholder text

• Match the real length. If the final headline will have six words, test with six words, not with a full sentence. Layouts that only look good with short copy break later.
• Test the extremes. Try one word, a very long paragraph and a field filled to its limit. Overflow, wrapping and truncation problems show up there first.
• Search before you launch. Placeholder text left on a live page looks unfinished to visitors. Search your site, your templates and your emails for "lorem" and "ipsum" before anything goes out.
• Remember screen readers. A screen reader reads placeholder text aloud like any other text. Do not leave it in alt text, labels or hidden headings.
• Use real content when the words matter. For usability tests, product pages and anything where meaning affects the design, a draft of the real text tells you more than lorem ipsum can.

Need to check the length of the real copy later? The character counter counts characters, words and lines of any text.

How to use the lorem ipsum generator

1. 1Type how much text you need and choose paragraphs, sentences, words or bytes.
2. 2Pick plain text, <p> tags or a list, set the paragraph length and decide whether the text starts with "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet".
3. 3Copy the text or download it as a .txt or .html file. New text gives you different words, and Copy link saves this exact text with your settings.

Frequently asked questions