Lorem ipsum generator

Generate placeholder paragraphs, sentences, words or list items, with the classic opening line if you want it.

Of
lorem.txt
Generating

Where the words come from

Not from nowhere. The passage is scrambled Latin taken from De finibus bonorum et malorum, a work on ethics that Cicero wrote in 45 BC, from the section arguing about pleasure and pain. The famous opening is a piece of a word: the original reads dolorem ipsum, and a printer's cut removed the first two letters, leaving lorem ipsum.

Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit.

"Nor is there anyone who loves pain itself because it is pain, or seeks it, or wants to have it." Cicero, book 1, in H. Rackham's 1914 translation.

Why it stuck

Printers have set nonsense text in specimen books since the 1500s, and this is the passage that survived. Letraset put it on dry transfer sheets in the 1960s, which spread it through every studio in the world, and desktop publishing carried it forward when Aldus PageMaker shipped it as filler in the 1980s. It endures because it behaves like text without being text: the word lengths and letter frequencies sit close enough to English for a paragraph to look right, and nobody stops to read it. That last part is the point. Filler in a real language pulls a reviewer into the words instead of the layout.

When to use it, and when not to

  • Good for a first layout pass, a type specimen, a component demo, or measuring how a column behaves at 45 to 75 characters a line.
  • Bad once the layout is settled. Real copy is shorter, longer and more awkward than filler, and a design that only holds together with lorem is a design that has not been tested yet. Headlines are where this bites first.
  • Never in anything that ships. It has appeared on live homepages, in printed catalogues and in App Store screenshots, and search engines index it happily. Keep it out of translation files and CMS defaults, which is how it usually escapes.
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Questions

Why use Latin rather than real copy?+

Because nonsense text stops a reviewer reading the words and starts them looking at the layout, which is the point of a mockup. Use real copy once the layout is settled: the length of real sentences is what breaks a design.

What is the list option for?+

Filling a bulleted list, a menu or a table without writing the markup yourself. Each line comes out as a markdown item.

Is the text different every time?+

Yes. The words are drawn from the standard passage using the browser's own random source, so two runs never give the same filler.

Is lorem ipsum real Latin?+

Not quite. The words are Latin and the source is Cicero, but the passage has been cut, reordered and misspelled for centuries, so it does not parse as a sentence. That is deliberate: text that can be read is text that gets read instead of the layout.

What happens if it reaches production?+

It gets indexed, and it gets seen. Lorem has shipped on live homepages, in printed catalogues and in app store screenshots. It escapes through CMS defaults, translation files and seeded databases, so those are the three places to check before a launch.

Related tools

The tools are free. So is most of the library.

1935 blocks and 989 pieces for shadcn/ui and Tailwind, built on the same tokens these tools write. Install one with a command and the code is yours.

No signup for the tools. MIT for free blocks, commercial licence for Pro.

Markdown version