Lorem Ipsum Generator
Generate placeholder text by the paragraph, sentence or word, as plain text, HTML paragraphs or Markdown.
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About this tool
Where Lorem ipsum comes from
Lorem ipsum is a scrambled passage from “De finibus bonorum et malorum”, a work on ethics that Cicero wrote in 45 BC. The source is book 1, sections 32 and 33, and the Latin scholar Richard McClintock is credited with identifying it. The word “lorem” is not Latin: it is the end of “dolorem”, which means pain, with its first syllable cut off. Cicero's sentence begins: “Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit”.
The passage has been used as filler in typesetting since at least the 1960s, when Letraset's dry-transfer lettering sheets made it widely known. In the 1980s it reached desktop publishing through the templates of Aldus PageMaker.
What placeholder text is for
Filler text lets you judge a layout before the real words exist. Because it means nothing, the people reviewing a design look at the typography, the spacing and the line length instead of reading and editing the copy. Its word lengths and letter mix are close enough to ordinary prose in a Latin-script language for a paragraph to have a natural texture.
The pitfall is that real content never has such convenient lengths. Try a design with real headlines, long names and short paragraphs before it ships, and search the finished work for “lorem” so that no placeholder reaches production.
How this generator writes
Words are drawn at random from a pool of 209: the words of the standard passage and words from the two sections of Cicero it was cut from. Sentences are between 4 and 22 words long, most of them between 8 and 14, and the longer ones get commas. When you ask for a number of words, the last sentence is lengthened or cut so that the count is exact. A paragraph has three to seven sentences, and the generator does not pick a word again within six words of its last use. The result looks like Latin but has no grammar and no meaning.
Regenerate draws a new text. Changing the output format keeps the words and changes only the markup: HTML wraps each paragraph in a <p> element, and Markdown puts some phrases in emphasis and, when you ask for more than one paragraph, adds a title and subheadings so that a Markdown renderer has something to style.
Questions
What does Lorem ipsum mean?
As a whole it means nothing, because words of the original were removed, altered and cut short. The phrase it comes from, dolorem ipsum, means “pain itself”: Cicero was writing that nobody loves pain for its own sake.
Is the generated text real Latin?
The words are Latin words, or shortened and altered forms of them, but they are put together at random. A Latin reader would recognise the vocabulary and find no sentence in it.
Why start with “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet”?
The opening is what makes the text recognisable as a placeholder at a glance, to you and to anyone who finds it later. Turn the option off if you need several blocks on one page and do not want them all to begin the same way.
Can I get an exact number of words?
Yes. Choose Words and enter the number. The text is cut to exactly that many words and still ends with a full stop. The limits are 20,000 words, 2,000 sentences or 200 paragraphs.