How to generate placeholder text
- Enter How many you need and choose Paragraphs, Sentences or Words.
- Choose Plain text, or HTML <p> tags if you are pasting into code or a CMS source view.
- Click Copy. The text is regenerated whenever you change a setting, and Generate new text gives you a different random version with the same settings.
The note beside the buttons shows the word and character count of what was generated, which helps when you need to fill a box of a known size.
What the settings produce
- Paragraphs – each paragraph has 4 to 7 sentences. Up to 100 paragraphs at a time.
- Sentences – each sentence has 6 to 15 words, starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop; longer sentences sometimes get a comma in the middle. The sentences are grouped into paragraphs of five. Up to 500 sentences.
- Words – exactly the number of words you ask for, as a single paragraph with a capital letter at the start and a full stop at the end. Up to 10,000 words.
- Start with “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” – makes the text begin with the familiar 19-word opening sentence, so anyone looking at the design recognises it as placeholder text at once. In Words mode, the first words of that sentence are used.
- Format – plain text separates paragraphs with an empty line; HTML wraps each paragraph in
<p>…</p>on its own line.
Examples
- 5 words with the classic opening:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.– a good stand-in for a short headline or a button label. - 3 words:
Lorem ipsum dolor. - 7 sentences: two paragraphs, the first with five sentences and the second with two.
- 2 paragraphs as HTML:
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, …</p>followed by a second<p>line with random sentences.
Everything after the classic opening is assembled at random from a vocabulary of about 130 Latin and Latin-looking words, so the result looks like Latin but is not grammatical Latin and has no meaning.
Where lorem ipsum comes from
The text is a scrambled extract from De finibus bonorum et malorum (“On the ends of good and evil”), a philosophical work by Cicero written in 45 BC. The source passage in sections 1.10.32–33 includes the words “neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet…” – roughly, “nor is there anyone who loves pain itself because it is pain”. Lorem is not a Latin word at all: it is the tail end of dolorem, cut off when the passage was chopped up. The scrambled text became widely known through Letraset dry-transfer lettering sheets in the 1960s and later through desktop publishing software. You will often read that printers have used it since the 1500s, but there is no solid evidence for that claim.
Why designers use it – and when not to
Placeholder text lets people judge a layout – type size, line length, spacing, the rhythm of headings and paragraphs – without getting distracted by reading the words. It also lets designers and developers build pages before the final copy exists. Lorem ipsum is popular for this because its mix of short and long words looks roughly like English or other European text on a page.
It has limits. Real content is rarely the neat length placeholder text suggests: headlines run to three lines, names are long, and translations into many languages take more space than the English original. Test your layout with realistic and extreme text as well, not only with tidy lorem ipsum. And if a design will be used for Korean, Japanese or Chinese, Latin filler shows nothing about how that script wraps and fills a line, so try a sample in the actual language.
Tips
- Use Words for fixed-length elements such as titles, product names, menu items and table cells, and Paragraphs for article bodies.
- Turn off the classic opening when you need several blocks on the same page that shouldn't all start identically.
- Before launch, search the site for “lorem” and “ipsum”. Placeholder text left on a live page looks unfinished to visitors, and pages with no real content offer nothing for search engines to rank.
- For filler that needs particular capitalisation, such as an all-caps heading, run the result through the Case Converter. To check that a generated block fits a word or character limit, use the Word Counter.
FAQ
Is lorem ipsum real Latin?
Only partly. The opening is a mangled version of a real Latin sentence, and most words in the vocabulary are real or nearly real Latin, but they are put together at random, so the text doesn't translate into anything meaningful.
Can I use the generated text in commercial work?
Yes. Cicero's text is more than two thousand years old and in the public domain, and the random text generated here carries no restrictions.
Can it generate headings or lists in HTML?
No. HTML output contains only paragraphs in <p> tags. Wrap individual lines in heading or list tags yourself if your mockup needs them.
Why does a screen reader stumble over it?
Screen readers try to pronounce it as words in the page language, which sounds like nonsense. That is one more reason to replace it before anything is published or tested with real users.