Generated Lorem Ipsum

The Lorem Generator is unique in that it allows you to really customize your Lorem Ipsum text.

• Generate all sorts of text: Generate words, sentences, paragraphs, as well as titles, captions, and real names.
• Change the case of the text: Make your text lower case, UPPER CASE, Title Case, or Sentence case.
• Add HTML tags and classes: Because Lorem Ipsum text is often used in web layouts, which are written in code, you can optionally wrap the generated text in an HTML tag, such as a p, div, a, etc. You can also optionally add CSS classes.
• Copy everything or just one item: Once you are happy with the generated text, click the "Copy all" button to copy all of the generated text. Or click on the clipboard icon to copy just a single item. Then paste your Lorem Ipsum text wherever you need it!

With origins in the medieval ages, this pseudo Latin text has been in use for over five centuries for text layout.

Lorem Ipsum is dummy placeholder text used to mock up print, graphics, and web layouts. The mysterious text that looks like pseudo-English is thought to have been created by a typesetter who mixed up Marcus Tullius Cicero’s philosophical piece, De Finibus bonorum et malorum (“On the ends of good and evil").

Lorem Ipsum usually begins with:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Its purpose is provide an illusion of content so the viewer focuses on the layout rather than the text.

Lorem Ipsum was popularized in the 1960s by Letraset, a UK company that manufactured typeface sheets, who used the passage in its advertisements for transfer sheets. Later in the 1980s, the placeholder text was brought into the digital world when desktop software publishers, like Aldus, used it in their word and graphic templates.

Today, Lorem Ipsum can be seen all over the web — in website templates, CSS libraries (such as Semantic UI), design templates, and more.

For a long time, Lorem Ipsum was thought to be nonsense text. Responding to a reader, Before & After, a desktop publishing magazine, answered “It’s not Latin, though it looks like it, and it actually says nothing. Its ‘words’ loosely approximate the frequency with which letters occur in English, which is why at a glance it looks pretty real.”

Not exactly.

The text looks like Latin because it was in fact derived from Latin, specifically Marcus Tullius Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (“On the Extremes of Good and Evil”), written in 45 BC. Richard McClintock, a former Latin professor who is now the publications director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, discovered this after looking up some of the more obscure words in the Lorem Ipsum passage.

McClintock found that one of the words in Lorem Ipsum, consectetur, was also in Cicero’s work, as was the phrase “lorem ipsum.” The line from Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum’s that contains lorem ipsum was:

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

which translates into:

There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain ...

According to Before & After Magazine McClintock remarked:

What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printed in the 1500s took a galley of type and scambled it to make a type specemin book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occational 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. It's ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to me' and 'greeking' have common semantic roots!

Who was Marcus Tullius Cicero and why did his work become the foundation for today’s placeholder text? Cicero was a Roman statesman, scholar, and lawyer, who lived from 106 BC to 43 BC, and had immense influence on the Latin language.

Cicero’s speeches and writing style became the standard for Classical Latin, and during the Enlightenment period, intellectuals and writers determined that Cicero’s style to be the only true Latin. In fact, Quintus Cornelius Proculus, a Roman senator, said “[Cicero] is not the name of a man, but of eloquence itself.”

To understand the influence of Cicero, consider this. Johannes Gutenberg, the inventory of the printing press, first printed Donatu’s Ar Minor and the Bible. For the third book, he choose Cicero’s De officiis.

Cicero was everywhere for a long time.

McClintock believes this is likely why one of Cicero’s works became placeholder text. He hypothesizes that during the Middle Ages, a typesetter had to create a sample book to show off a variety of fonts. To focus the reader on the fonts and not the text, he decided to take a page from Latin and choose a Cicero work. The typesetter then scrambled the work to turn it into gibberish, and thus Lorem Ipsum was born.

Does Lorem Ipsum have any meaning? “Lorem,” in fact, isn’t even a Latin word. It is the second half of “dolorem,” which means “sorrow” or “pain.”

This did not deter on scholar from taking a stab at translating the text. According to The Guardian, Cambridge Latin scholar, Jaspreet Singh Boparai attempted to translate the passage.

Below is the standard Lorem Ipsum passage that has been used since the 1500s, followed by Boparai’s translation.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Boparai’s translation:

Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it, ishing for its acquisitiendum. Because he will ab hold, unless but through concer, and also of those who resist. Now a pure snore disturbeded sum dust. He ejjnoyes, in order that somewon, also with a severe one, unless of life. May a cusstums offficer somewon nothing of a poison-filled. Until, from a twho, twho chaffinch may also pursue it, not even a lump. But as twho, as a tank; a proverb, yeast; or else they tinscribe nor. Yet yet dewlap bed. Twho may be, let him love fellows of a polecat. Now amour, the, twhose being, drunk, yet twhitch and, an enclosed valley's always a laugh. In acquisitiendum the Furies are Earth; in (he takes up) a lump vehicles bien.

In describing his translation efforts, Boparai said his “basic challenge was to make this text precisely as incoherent in English as it is in Latin - and to make it incoherent in the same way. So, the Greek 'eu' in Latin became the French 'bien' in my translation, and the '-ing' ending in 'lorem ipsum' seemed best rendered by an '-iendum' in English.”

Google has a humorous take on the passage. Type the passage into Google Translate and you get:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Bureau except for the care and nutrition. Now put some chili orange couch. How sad players of bananas weekend. No bananas airline blockage. Unfortunately, from the Pakistan, and that it is not the mass of dui fringilla consectetur. Gluten. However, the scent like a pool or sit nor was warm. But the skirt, but graduated. Homework is important members of the football. Peanut homework now, real estate and at dui, the valley is always laughter. The undergraduate basketball land mass receives the vehicles football

It has been thought that Lorem Ipsum is used as placeholder text because it mimics the look and cadence of the English language—in the distribution of word lengths, consonant and vowel balance, and punctuation—without having any meaning. Therefore, readers are not distracted by the text itself and can focus on the design and layout.

However, not all designers are in favor of using dummy text, like Lorem Ipsum. According to Basecamp’s design guide, Getting Real, using dummy text can be dangerous.

Lorem ipsum changes the way copy is viewed. It reduces text-based content to a visual design element — a shape of text — instead of what it should be: valuable information someone is going to have to enter and/or read. Dummy text means you won’t see the inevitable variations that show up once real information is entered. It means you won’t know what it’s like to fill out forms on your site. Dummy text is a veil between you and reality.

By using dummy text that is not reflective of what will be real text, you could make serious design errors. For example, form fields may be too long or too short.

Luke Wroblewski in “Death to Lorem Ipsum,” believes “real data delivers really effective design,” and advocates using real text whenever possible.

Using dummy content or fake information in the Web design process can result in products with unrealistic assumptions and potentially serious design flaws. A seemingly elegant design can quickly begin to bloat with unexpected content or break under the weight of actual activity.

Should you stop using Lorem Ipsum? Karen McGrane, managing partner at Bond Art + Science, disagrees:

Lorem Ipsum: a sign that you’re a traitor to all that is good and right and holy in the world of web design, or an occasionally useful tool that, used intentionally, may help solve some problems? I’m going to go with the latter. If you’ve got a problem with content strategy, fix the bigger problem. Otherwise you’re just treating the symptoms, not curing the disease.

So when should you use Lorem Ipsum? Lorem Ipsum is very helpful in the design stage, particular when the content will be dynamic, as is the case when designing website templates for content management systems, such as blogs. Here, with Lorem Ipsum, multiple templates can be tested by users.

Next, use Lorem Ipsum whenever you think the real content will distract from the design or a discussion around the design. If you think that questions will arise about the content, then, as Karen McGrane recommends, use Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum exists because words are powerful. If you fill up your page with draft copy about your client’s business, they will read it. They will comment on it. They will be inexorably drawn to it. Presented the wrong way, draft copy can send your design review off the rails. Telling a client to ignore Lorem Ipsum is a one-time thing. They quit reading it because it doesn’t make sense. Telling a client to ignore draft copy can be a never-ending battle.

Lorem Ipsum generators usually work by randomly drawing words from the original Lorem Ipsum passage. Some pull sentences and phrases directly from the original passage and therefore will repeat chunks text. Ours does not do this.

First, our generator makes assumptions about the number of words per sentence, and the number of words per paragraph, based on average rates across articles. This results in Lorem Ipsum text that closely mimics real text.

Second, by randomly selecting words from the Lorem Ipsum text, we can generate as much placeholder text as you want without repeating any sections of the original Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum is derived from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero's De Finibus bonorum et malorum. The original passages in Latin are below along with H. Rackham's 1914 translation into English.

Cicero's De Finibus bonorum et malorum (Section 1.10.32)

The original Latin text:

Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa, quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt, explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet consectetur adipisci[ng] velit, sed quia non numquam [do] eius modi tempora inci[di]dunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

H. Rackham's translation:

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing of a pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

Cicero's De Finibus bonorum et malorum (Section 1.10.33)

The original Latin text:

At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus, qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti, quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint, obcaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa, qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio. Nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio, cumque nihil impedit, quo minus id, quod maxime placeat, facere possimus, omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis dolor repellendus. Temporibus autem quibusdam et aut officiis debitis aut rerum necessitatibus saepe eveniet, ut et voluptates repudiandae sint et molestiae non recusandae. Itaque earum rerum hic tenetur a sapiente delectus, ut aut reiciendis voluptatibus maiores alias consequatur aut perferendis doloribus asperiores repellat…

H. Rackham's translation:

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.