Lorem Ipsum Generator

Placeholder copy for a layout you're still designing, built fresh each time you press Generate instead of copied from a fixed passage.

Every block is assembled from scratch

Ask for fifty paragraphs and you get fifty different ones. That matters more than you'd think. A generator that recycles a fixed set fills a mock-up with repeated blocks, and that hides the very line-length and ragging problems placeholder text is supposed to show up.

The generator draws from a 179-word Latin vocabulary. Each sentence is 6 to 15 words long, picked at random, and each paragraph holds 3 to 6 sentences. About half the time a comma goes into the middle of a longer sentence so the rhythm doesn't go flat. The odds of two blocks matching are effectively nil, since a single sentence has more possible forms than there are atoms worth counting.

Because of that randomness, this isn't the Cicero passage in its traditional order. It's words from that passage in a new arrangement, so the same word can turn up twice in one sentence, and a Latin reader would find it meaningless. Placeholder text has always been meaningless (that's the point of it), but don't treat the output as a quotation of anything.

Four shapes of output

Paragraphs for body copy, Sentences for a run of prose without paragraph breaks, Words for a headline or a label, and List items for a bulleted block. The count field accepts 1 to 200.

The classic opener is a checkbox. Leave it ticked and the first sentence begins Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit before the random words start, which makes that sentence 14 to 23 words long instead of 6 to 15. Untick it and everything is random from the first word.

There's one small catch in Words mode. The opener is eight words and its fifth word carries a comma, so if you ask for five words with the opener on you get Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, with the trailing comma. Ask for six or more and it reads normally.

Wrapping it in HTML

There are three output formats. Plain text separates blocks with a blank line. HTML paragraphs wraps each block in <p> tags. HTML list wraps the whole set in <ul> with each block on its own indented <li>.

The wrapper follows the blocks, and not the sentences. In Sentences mode everything you asked for is one block, so the <p> format gives you a single paragraph element holding all of them. That's fine if you wanted one dense paragraph, but if you expected one tag per sentence, switch to Paragraphs or List items.

<ul>
  <li>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit magna...</li>
  <li>Voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium totam rem aperiam...</li>
</ul>

Placeholder text has a shelf life

It has two limitations, and the second one costs people real money.

Latin word lengths aren't English word lengths, and they're nothing like German or Japanese ones. A card that holds three lines of this might hold four lines of your finished copy, or two. Placeholder text tells you a layout can breathe; it doesn't tell you the layout fits. Test the real strings before you sign anything off, including the longest translation you'll have to ship.

Then there's placeholder text that makes it onto a live page. A search engine sees it as thin content, and a customer just finds it embarrassing. It happens on nearly every project that ships in a hurry, so search your templates for the phrase before release.

Related tools for layout work

• Word Counter: check the generated block against a length budget.
• Random Text Generator: random strings and passphrases instead of Latin prose.
• Text Cleaner: tidy a list once real copy replaces the placeholder.