What Is Lorem Ipsum, and Why Do Designers Still Use It?
Lorem ipsum is placeholder text - words with no meaning, used to fill a design before the real content exists. The Lorem Ipsum Generator produces as much of it as you need.
It is real Latin, badly mangled
The passage comes from Cicero's "De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum", written in 45 BC - a treatise on the theory of ethics. The relevant section begins "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet", which translates roughly as "nor is there anyone who loves pain itself because it is pain".
The familiar text is that passage with words truncated, letters dropped and fragments reordered - "dolorem ipsum" becoming "lorem ipsum". The corruption is the point: the result reads as Latin without being Latin, so nobody mistakes it for content.
It entered typesetting in the 1500s, when a printer scrambled the passage to make a type specimen, and it reached modern design through Letraset sheets in the 1960s and then PageMaker in the 1980s. Which is why every design tool has it: it was already in the previous one.
Why nonsense is better than real text
This is the part worth understanding, because it is the whole argument.
A reader cannot read it, so they look at it instead. Put real copy into a layout and everyone in the room starts editing the words - arguing about the headline, correcting a comma - rather than judging the spacing, the hierarchy and the rhythm of the page. Nonsense text removes that distraction completely.
It also has roughly the right texture. The word lengths and letter frequencies are close enough to English that a block of it looks like a block of English prose, which is exactly what a layout needs to be tested against. A block of "text text text" does not.
Where using it is a mistake
When the real content is shorter or longer than the placeholder. This is the failure that matters. A design built around three tidy paragraphs breaks when the actual copy is one line or nine. Fill a layout with roughly the amount of text it will really hold, not a comfortable amount.
When the words should inform the design. If a product name is four words long, a button is a different width. Placeholder text hides those problems until late.
When a client sees it without warning. Latin in a mockup has been mistaken for a mistake more than once, and worse, placeholder text has reached live sites and print runs. If it is in a file, it should be obvious that it is temporary.
For testing how a layout copes with volume rather than realistic prose, the Text Repeater is the blunter and sometimes better instrument.
Common questions
Does it affect SEO if it reaches a live page?
Yes, badly - a page of meaningless text tells a search engine nothing and reads as low quality. Never publish it.
Are there alternatives?
Plenty, from Cicero variants to joke generators. The only thing that matters is that nobody can read it as content.
How much should I generate?
As much as the real content will be. That is the whole discipline.
Can I use it in a word count test?
It works fine for that - the Word Counter does not care what the words mean.
Need some placeholder text?