Do you need some placeholder text for a design, a web page or a form you are testing, and you would rather not type “text goes here” forty times? Set how much you need below and this lorem ipsum generator has it ready to copy.
Every setting changes the text straight away, and New text shuffles it. The part the well known generators do not do is exact characters: ask for 160 and you get exactly 160, ending on a whole word and a full stop.
Nothing you make here leaves your browser. It is all made on your own computer, so there is no upload and nothing stored.
Made in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and nothing is stored.
What each setting does
- How many and Of are the amount and the unit. Paragraphs, sentences, words and list items are exact counts: ask for 50 words and you get 50, however they fall into paragraphs.
- Characters, exactly sets the length of the text to the character, for filling a box to its limit. There is more on that below.
- Format gives plain text, HTML with
<p>and<ul>tags, or Markdown. The HTML is the code to paste, not a preview. - Paragraph length is about two to four sentences for short, four to seven for medium and seven to eleven for long.
- Start with “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” puts the opening everybody recognises first, whole whenever it fits. Untick it for text that starts anywhere.
- Add headings puts a heading before every second paragraph, for checking how a theme styles headings and body text together.
It makes up to 200 paragraphs, 1,000 sentences, 20,000 words, 100,000 characters or 200 list items at once, and it tells you when you have asked for more than that.
Filling a box to the last character
A lot of placeholder text goes into boxes with a limit: a meta description that Google cuts at around 160 characters, a single text message of 160, a form field that stops typing at 255. To test those properly you need text that is exactly that long, not roughly.
Most generators either give you an approximate length or chop the text at the limit, often in the middle of a word. This one picks the length of the last word or two so that the text ends exactly on your number, on a whole word, with a full stop.
In HTML the count is the text itself, and the tags come on top. It does not work below 3 characters, because the shortest sentence it can make, Ut., is three characters long. To check the length of any text of your own, our character counter counts it the same way. The meta tag generator shows how a description looks in a search result.
Where lorem ipsum comes from, and the part that is a myth
Lorem ipsum is cut out of a real book: De finibus bonorum et malorum, “On the Ends of Good and Evil”, written by Cicero in 45 BC. The standard text comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33.
“Lorem” is not even a Latin word. It is what is left of dolorem, “pain”, with the first letters chopped off. The original line talks about anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, which is a fairly grim sentence to be decorating so many cheerful websites. The passage was cut up and shuffled until it no longer means anything, and that is exactly why it works as filler: it looks like text without anybody stopping to read it.
Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, traced it back to Cicero by looking up one of its rarer words, consectetur, in classical literature.
Now the myth. Almost every lorem ipsum page says printers have used it since the 1500s. There is no evidence for that. The date comes from a single letter sent to a magazine in the 1990s, and it has been copied from site to site ever since. The earliest use anybody can actually show is on Letraset’s rub-on lettering sheets in the 1960s, and from there it spread into desktop publishing software.
When lorem ipsum is the wrong choice
Lorem ipsum is like a mannequin in a shop window: fine for seeing how the clothes hang, no help in telling you whether they fit a real person.
Real content is rarely the shape of the filler. Real headlines are longer or shorter, a German translation can be a third longer, and a layout that looked perfect with neat Latin paragraphs can break the day the real words arrive. I recommend swapping in real text as soon as you have any, even a rough draft of it.
Be careful with it on anything that goes live. Forgotten placeholder text is one of the most common embarrassments on the web, and a search for lorem ipsum turns up real business sites still showing it. Screen readers also read it out loud as nonsense Latin to anybody using one.
FAQ(Lorem Ipsum)
Is lorem ipsum real Latin?
Partly. The words come from Cicero, but they were cut up and shuffled, so it has no meaning as it stands, and some of the words, “lorem” among them, are not complete Latin words at all.
Can I use it in a commercial project?
Yes. It comes from a book written more than 2,000 years ago, and designers have passed the scrambled version around freely for decades.
Why is the text different every time?
It is put together at random from the standard lorem ipsum words each time, so two layouts never share identical filler by accident. The opening stays the same whenever Start with is ticked.
Does it work without an internet connection?
Once the page has loaded, yes. Everything is made in your browser, so nothing needs to be fetched after that.
For the formats themselves, our guides on what a Markdown file is and how to create an HTML file explain where each kind of text goes.
If you have any issues, you can ask me via comment, and I will love to help you out.