What Is Lorem Ipsum? Where It Comes From and How to Use It

What lorem ipsum is

Lorem ipsum is text that looks like a real paragraph but says nothing. A designer drops it into a page layout so that people judge the type, the spacing and the shape of the page instead of reading the words. The usual opening is “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit”, and the rest follows in a similar vein: long Latin-looking words, sentences of a natural length, and paragraphs of a believable size.

Here is a paragraph made by the generator on this site: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ipsum aut vitae aliquip quaerat velit, natus nulla doloremque. Laudantium esse proident quasi at, labore blanditiis nostrud illo ullamco.” It has 27 words and no meaning.

The idea is old. The point of placeholder text is that it should not draw attention to itself. Real words invite the reader to stop looking at the design and start reading, and a line such as “Content goes here” repeated down a page looks wrong because every line has the same length. Text that resembles language has the uneven lengths and the grey texture of a real page without any of its message.

Where it comes from

The text comes from De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”), a work of philosophy by the Roman writer Cicero from the first century BC. The passage is in sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33, which discuss pleasure and pain. Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden–Sydney College in the United States, traced the placeholder text back to those sections, and the version in use today comes from sheets of dry-transfer lettering that Letraset first published in 1966. Those sheets spread the text through typesetting and printing from the late 1960s, and word processors and page-layout software adopted it later.

The text is not a faithful copy. It is a corrupted version of Cicero’s original: syllables are cut from the front of words (“dolorem” became “lorem”), word endings were changed, and some letters do not appear in the source at all. The result has almost no meaning in Latin. A typographer, Dan Rhatigan, has suggested the garbling may have been deliberate, to bring the letter frequencies closer to English. Whatever the reason, you cannot translate lorem ipsum into a sensible sentence, however many websites claim to.

Why designers use it, and why some do not

There are good reasons to use placeholder text. It lets a layout be built before the writing is finished. It keeps a client reviewing the design instead of correcting the copy. It tests how a template copes with a short paragraph and a long one. And because it is the same text everywhere, nobody has to wonder whether a sentence in a mock-up is a real claim.

There are good reasons not to. Many designers now argue for working with real content as early as possible, because placeholder text hides the problems that real text causes: a headline that wraps onto three lines, a name that does not fit a card, a long German word that breaks a column, a table with a number in every cell. A design approved with perfect-looking lorem ipsum can fall apart the day real content arrives.

A sensible middle path is to use placeholder text for the early rough layouts and swap in real or realistic content as soon as it exists, using the longest and shortest real examples you have to stress the design.

When to use it, and when to replace it

• Use it in wireframes, templates, themes and mock-ups that are not public.
• Use it to test how a layout handles very short, very long and empty text, by asking for an exact number of characters or words.
• Use it in unit tests and demos where you need stable text, by keeping the same seed so the output never changes.
• Do not leave it on a published page. A live page of placeholder text gives readers nothing, gives search engines nothing to understand and looks unfinished. Search your pages for “lorem” before every launch.
• Do not use it where accessibility testing matters. A screen reader reads it aloud as Latin, which hides how real content will sound and how headings and links are announced.

Making text of the right length

Generators usually count in paragraphs, which is a poor fit for testing a field with a limit. This site’s generator can also count in sentences, words, list items and exact characters. Ask for 160 characters and you get exactly 160, spaces and the final full stop included, ending in a full stop and never in a space: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ipsa illo eu deleniti praesentium qui eu est laudantium architecto dignissimos ut iusto nesciunt vitae.”

The seed matters for teams. The same seed and settings always give the same text, so two designers, a developer and a test suite can all have identical placeholder content. Changing the seed gives fresh text when a layout needs a different shape.

Getting HTML, lists and headings

Pasting plain text into a template and then adding tags by hand is slow, so the generator can output HTML directly. Paragraphs come wrapped in paragraph tags. Lists come as an unordered or ordered list. For a page that needs structure, the headings option puts a short heading before every second paragraph. For example, three list items as HTML look like this:

<ul><li>Dolores non aspernatur non velit</li><li>Ratione eaque do amet velit omnis commodo</li><li>Irure ipsam lorem rem magna ad deserunt</li></ul>

Markdown output uses the usual dashes and hash marks, and JSON gives an array of strings, ready to paste into a test fixture or a content-management mock.

Right-to-left layouts: Arabic and Urdu

If your product will be used in Arabic, Urdu, Hebrew or Persian, Latin placeholder text tells you nothing about it. Right-to-left text flows from the right, aligns to the right, reverses the order of columns and icons, and joins its letters. A layout that looks perfect with Latin lorem ipsum can have a button on the wrong side, a menu that opens off-screen or numbers in the wrong order.

The generator has Arabic and Urdu word banks of common words picked at random, so the sentences mean nothing but the script, the direction and the punctuation are right, including the Urdu full stop. HTML output carries the dir attribute, which the W3C recommends for marking up direction. Always have a reader of the language look over a real right-to-left screen before launch, because random words cannot show how real sentences break across a line.

The classic opening, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit”, is only offered for Latin, since it is a Latin sentence.

Common questions

Sources

Reviewed on 20 Oct 2026 against the published sources below. Laws and prices change, so check the current position before you rely on a figure.

• Wikipedia: Lorem ipsum (source text, Letraset sheets of 1966, how the text was altered)
• W3C Internationalization: structural markup and right-to-left text (the dir attribute)

The history is taken from the Wikipedia article on lorem ipsum, which cites the printed sources, and the notes on right-to-left text from the W3C. The advice on when to use placeholder text is practical guidance, not a standard. The example texts on this page were made by the generator on this site.

Try the calculator

Keep reading