Lorem Ipsum Generator
Generate Lorem Ipsum placeholder text instantly. Choose paragraphs, sentences, words or bytes. Start with the classic opening, wrap in HTML tags. Free, no signup.
Lorem Ipsum Generator Tool
How to Use the Lorem Ipsum Generator
Choose your output type
Select Paragraphs for full text blocks, Sentences for individual lines, Words for raw word lists, or Bytes to hit a specific file size.
Set the quantity
Enter how many paragraphs, sentences, words, or bytes you need. The default is set for the most common use case.
Toggle your options
Check "Start with Lorem ipsum..." to use the classic opening. Enable HTML tags if you're pasting into a web layout.
Click Generate and Copy
Your text appears instantly. Hit Copy to grab it all — then paste into Figma, your CMS, or your code.
Where the Words Come From — and What This Generator Does With Them
Cicero, Book 1, Section 32
The opening words are a real fragment of Latin, not invented gibberish. Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum ("On the Ends of Good and Evil"), written in 45 BC, puts an Epicurean argument about pleasure and pain into the mouth of Torquatus. At Book 1, section 32 (cited 1.10.32 in the older chapter-and-section scheme) the Latin runs "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit…" — nobody loves, seeks or wishes to obtain pain for its own sake, merely because it is pain. The reference edition is the Loeb Classical Library volume 40, H. Rackham's 1914 text and translation, Latin and English on facing pages.
"Lorem" itself is not a word. It is the tail of dolorem with its first syllable cut off, and the filler carries other mutations too: Cicero's adipisci velit ("would wish to obtain") became the non-Latin adipiscing elit, and eius modi was fused into eiusmod. Those changes are why the text looks like Latin, scans like Latin, and cannot be read as Latin — the property that makes it useful as a stand-in for copy.
The 1994 identification, and the part of the story that turned out to be a guess
The source stayed unidentified in the design trade until Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar and publications director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, noticed that consectetur is a genuine but rare Latin word and looked it up. It led him to De finibus. He published the finding as a letter in Before & After magazine (volume 4, number 2, 1994), correcting the editor's earlier statement that the filler meant nothing.
The same letter said the passage had been scrambled by "some printer in the 1500s" to make a type specimen book. That sentence has been copied onto almost every lorem ipsum page since, including, until this revision, this one. It was a conjecture: McClintock later acknowledged it had no evidence behind it, and no sixteenth-century specimen using the text has ever been produced (Slate, 2023). What can be documented is much later. The odd break inside do-lorem matches a page turn in the 1914 Loeb edition, where the Latin runs "do-" at the foot of one page and "lorem ipsum" at the head of the next — the plausible reason the filler starts mid-word.
Letraset, PageMaker and everything after
The earliest dated placeholder use is the 1960s: Letraset, the London maker of dry-transfer lettering, sold rub-down sheets of body copy set in lorem ipsum in a range of typefaces and sizes, so that layout artists could position realistic text before any copy existed. The filler crossed into software when Aldus PageMaker (1985), the first widely used desktop publishing program, shipped it as its default sample text. From there it was inherited by every page-layout and design tool, and by generators like this one.
What this generator actually produces
The word pool holds 186 distinct Latin words drawn from the standard filler and from the surrounding Cicero passage (255 entries in all; the most familiar words appear more than once, so they surface more often). Each sentence is 15–25 words, capitalised, with one comma placed somewhere between a third and two-thirds of the way through, and ends with a full stop. Each paragraph is 4–8 such sentences. The classic 19-word opening sentence is the Letraset/PageMaker form, not Cicero's, and it is a checkbox: leave it on when you want a reader to recognise the text instantly as placeholder, turn it off when you need every paragraph to look like body copy.
Random choices are re-seeded on every click, so two presses of Generate never give the same text beyond the opening sentence. Nothing leaves your browser: there is no request to a server, and nothing you generate is stored.
When Latin filler misleads you
Placeholder text tests the shape of a layout, not its content, and Latin filler tests it only for Latin-script languages. Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters are set on a full em square, so a line carries fewer characters and breaks in different places; Tamil stacks marks above and below the baseline and needs more line-height; Jawi (Arabic-script Malay) runs right to left. For a Singapore or Malaysian interface that will carry English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil, a frame that looks finished in lorem ipsum can break the moment real strings are pasted in. Use this generator for early visual exploration, and drop in a few lines of genuine target-language copy before the layout is signed off.
Cicero's page turn, McClintock's letter and Letraset's rub-down sheets
The source is Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum 1.10.32 (45 BC) — an Epicurean argument, spoken by Torquatus, that nobody pursues pain for its own sake.
"Lorem" is not a word. It is dolorem ("pain") with its first syllable lost — the break matches a page turn in the 1914 Loeb edition, where "do-" ends one page and "lorem ipsum" opens the next.
Cicero wrote adipisci velit; the filler says adipiscing elit. Neither adipiscing, elit nor eiusmod is a Latin word — the scrambling turned real vocabulary into look-alikes.
Richard McClintock of Hampden-Sydney College identified the passage by looking up the rare word consectetur; his letter appeared in Before & After magazine, vol. 4 no. 2, in 1994.
The line about "a printer in the 1500s" comes from that same letter and was a guess. No sixteenth-century specimen using the text has ever been found (Slate, 2023).
The earliest dated use as placeholder is the 1960s Letraset dry-transfer sheets of body copy, sold in a range of typefaces and sizes for paste-up layouts.
Aldus PageMaker (1985) shipped lorem ipsum as its default sample text, carrying the filler from the paste-up table into desktop publishing and, from there, into every design tool.
This generator draws on 186 distinct words. Sentences run 15–25 words with one comma; paragraphs run 4–8 sentences; the classic opening is exactly 19 words and 123 characters.
Bytes mode counts UTF-8 bytes and trims back to the last whole word, so the output is never longer than the target — usually a few bytes under it. The filler is pure ASCII, so here one byte is one character.
Cicero died in 43 BC, so the underlying text is in the public domain. You may paste the output into any commercial mockup, template or codebase without attribution.
Frequently Asked Questions
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The opening sentence is the standard 19-word, 123-character form that Letraset and Aldus PageMaker fixed in the trade — the one every designer recognises on sight. It is controlled by the "Start with Lorem ipsum…" checkbox. Leave it on when you want the reader to know at a glance that the copy is placeholder; switch it off when every paragraph should look like anonymous body text, for instance in a print specimen or a screenshot for a client.
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Each sentence is 15–25 words with a single comma placed between a third and two-thirds of the way through. Each paragraph is 4–8 sentences, so paragraphs range from about 60 to 200 words — a spread deliberately wide enough to show how your layout copes with a short paragraph next to a long one. If you need paragraphs of a fixed length, generate in Sentences mode and group them yourself.
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Bytes mode builds sentences until the UTF-8 length reaches your target, cuts back to the target and then drops any partial word at the end. The result is therefore never longer than the number you asked for and is usually a few bytes shorter. Because the word pool is pure ASCII, one byte equals one character, so a 500-byte request is also a ≤500-character string. If a test needs an exact byte count, pad the tail yourself.
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Yes. With the classic opening enabled, the first words are taken from the opening sentence (punctuation stripped) and the remainder are filled from the pool; with it disabled, all words come from the pool. Words are separated by single spaces with no terminal full stop, which makes the output safe for tag clouds, chip lists and truncation tests where a trailing period would distort the measurement.
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The pool contains 186 distinct words (255 entries, because common words such as dolor, voluptas and consequatur are listed more than once and so appear more often). Words are drawn at random, so repetition within a long passage is expected and is normal for placeholder text. The generator does not reproduce Cicero's sentences in order; only the opening sentence is fixed.
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In Paragraphs mode, each paragraph is wrapped in an opening and closing <p> tag, and paragraphs are separated by a blank line. No classes, ids or inline styles are added, so the markup pastes cleanly into a CMS rich-text field, a Blade or JSX template, or an innerHTML assignment. The option is hidden in the other three modes because a sentence list or a word run has no paragraph structure to wrap.
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It is scrambled Latin. The words come from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum 1.10.32 (45 BC), where the argument is that no one desires pain for its own sake. Words were cut, joined and altered — dolorem lost its first syllable to become "lorem", adipisci velit became adipiscing elit — so the passage cannot be translated as it stands. Richard McClintock traced it to Cicero in 1994 by looking up the rare word consectetur.
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Yes. Cicero's text has been in the public domain for two millennia, and the output of this generator carries no licence, attribution requirement or fee. Use it in mockups, templates, test fixtures and published designs alike. The only practical caution is the usual one: search a shipped product for "lorem ipsum" before release, so no placeholder reaches customers.
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Whenever the real copy will not be in a Latin script or will differ sharply in length. Chinese, Japanese and Korean set on a full em square and break lines by character; Tamil needs extra line-height for stacked marks; Jawi and Arabic run right to left; German and Malay compound words run longer than English. For a bilingual or multilingual interface, test with a few lines of the actual target language alongside the filler before the layout is approved. Latin filler is fine for type selection, rhythm and spacing in the exploratory stage.
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No. The word pool and the generator run entirely in your browser; pressing Generate makes no network request, and nothing is logged or stored. The tool works without an account and without any cookie consent. The random seed is reset on every click, so the text is different each time unless you keep the classic opening, which is fixed.
Method & sources
How it computes
Generates placeholder text in the browser from a fixed pool of 186 distinct Latin words (255 weighted entries) taken from the standard lorem ipsum filler and the surrounding passage of Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum 1.10.32. Sentences are 15–25 words with one comma; paragraphs are 4–8 sentences; the optional 19-word opening is the Letraset/PageMaker form. Bytes mode counts UTF-8 bytes and trims to the last whole word so output never exceeds the target.
What this tool implements
- Source text: Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, Book 1 §32 (1.10.32), as printed in the Loeb Classical Library vol. 40 (H. Rackham, 1914) — the edition whose 'do-|lorem' page turn matches the filler's mid-word start.
- History stated as documented, not as legend: McClintock's 1994 identification via 'consectetur' is presented as fact; his 'printer in the 1500s' line is presented as an unverified conjecture, with the earliest dated placeholder use given as Letraset's 1960s transfer sheets and the software lineage as Aldus PageMaker (1985).
- Byte counting per UTF-8 (TextEncoder); the pool is ASCII so 1 byte = 1 character on this page.
- Output is deterministic in structure (sentence and paragraph bounds) and random in word choice; re-seeded per click; no network request.
Sources
- Cicero. De finibus bonorum et malorum (On Ends), Book 1 §32. Rackham H, trans. Loeb Classical Library 40. Harvard University Press / William Heinemann; 1914 (2nd ed. 1931).
- McClintock R. Letter to the editor on the origin of 'Lorem ipsum'. Before & After 1994;4(2).
- Slate. The hero(ine) who invented Lorem Ipsum may never be known. January 2023. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/01/lorem-ipsum-history-o…
- Cima R. The History of Lorem Ipsum. Priceonomics; 13 March 2015. https://priceonomics.com/the-history-of-lorem-ipsum/
What can make this go out of date
- none at runtime
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