What it is and when to use it
Lorem ipsum is scrambled placeholder text that designers and developers drop into layouts before real copy exists. Because it looks like ordinary language but carries no meaning, reviewers judge typography, spacing and hierarchy instead of reading the words. The passage derives from a work by the Roman writer Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, which has been used for typesetting samples for a very long time.
Use this generator when you are mocking up a web page, testing how a template handles long and short paragraphs, filling a document design or checking word-wrap and column behaviour. Choose how many paragraphs and how many sentences per paragraph you want, whether to start with the classic opening line, and whether the output is plain text or wrapped in HTML paragraph tags. Each run produces different text, because the words and sentence lengths are chosen at random.
How the text is generated
The generator draws words at random from a fixed list of Latin-style words. Each sentence has between 6 and 14 words, a comma is inserted inside longer sentences, the first word is capitalised and the sentence ends with a full stop.
- Paragraphs: 1 to 50, defaulting to 3 if left blank.
- Sentences per paragraph: 1 to 30, defaulting to 5 if left blank.
- Start with "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet": when ticked, the first sentence of the first paragraph is the fixed 8-word line "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit."
- Output format: plain text separates paragraphs with a blank line, while HTML wraps each in a p element.
The results panel counts paragraphs, sentences, words and characters, so you can see how much text you generated.
Worked example: 3 paragraphs of 5 sentences
With the defaults there are 3 × 5 = 15 sentences. With the classic opening ticked, one sentence is the fixed 8-word line and the other 14 have 6 to 14 words each.
The minimum word count is 8 + 14 × 6 = 92 words, and the maximum is 8 + 14 × 14 = 204 words. The average is 8 + 14 × 10 = about 148 words.
Because the words are random, the exact count differs from run to run. The results line always reports the actual paragraph, sentence, word and character counts for the text you see.
Common mistakes and how to interpret the result
- Shipping placeholder text. Placeholder copy left in a published page can look unprofessional and can harm search visibility, so replace every block before launch.
- Designing only with placeholder length. Real content is rarely as tidy as generated sentences, so test with the longest and shortest real headings and paragraphs you expect.
- Expecting meaningful Latin. The words are shuffled and the sentences have no real meaning, so do not quote them or treat them as authentic Latin text.
- Forgetting escape rules for HTML. When you choose the HTML format, paste the output into a page as markup and not into a plain-text field, or the tags will show up literally.