What is lorem ipsum? Origin, meaning and when to use it

Lorem ipsum is the dummy text that fills mockups, templates and type specimens until the real words are written. It starts “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit” and comes from a passage on pleasure and pain in Cicero’s philosophical dialogue De finibus bonorum et malorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”), which he wrote in the summer of 45 BC. Somewhere along the way the Latin was chopped up and garbled, so it now looks like ordinary text but says nothing. That is the point: people judging a layout look at the type, spacing and structure instead of reading the copy. If you need some right now, the lorem ipsum generator makes paragraphs, sentences, words or an exact character count.

The standard passage

This is the version most generators, templates and design tools use, often called the “classic” paragraph:

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.

It has 69 words and 63 different ones. Longer placeholder text is made by repeating or shuffling these words, which is what our generator does: every word it uses comes from this paragraph.

Where lorem ipsum comes from

The words come from Book I, sections 32 and 33 of De finibus. In this part of the dialogue the character Torquatus defends the Epicurean view that people seek pleasure and avoid pain. The source sentence, as printed in the Latin Library edition, reads:

neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit, amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.

H. Rackham’s 1914 English translation renders it: “Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.”

The odd first word has a simple explanation. In Rackham’s 1914 Latin and English edition, the Latin on page 34 ends “neque porro quisquam est qui do-”, splitting dolorem across the page turn, and page 36 begins “lorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit”. Whoever made the dummy text appears to have started at the top of a page. The French Latinist Philippe Cibois, who reviewed the evidence in 2012, concluded that lorem ipsum was most likely created from this edition, so no earlier than 1914.

What the words mean

As it stands, lorem ipsum has no meaning. Some words are untouched Latin, some are cut short, and some were changed so they are no longer real words. Comparing the opening with Cicero shows the pattern:

Lorem ipsum	Cicero’s Latin	Meaning in Cicero	What changed
lorem ipsum	dolorem ipsum	pain itself	“do-” cut off at the page break
dolor sit amet	dolor sit, amet	(because) it is pain, loves	comma dropped
consectetur adipiscing elit	consectetur, adipisci velit	pursues, desires to obtain	“adipisci” became “adipiscing”, “velit” lost its “v”
sed do eiusmod tempor	sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora	but because occasionally … times	words removed, “do” added, “tempora” cut
incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua	incidunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam	occur, so that with toil and pain … some great	“incidunt” lengthened, endings cut

The rest of the paragraph works the same way, borrowing fragments from further on in sections 32 and 33 (excepturi sint occaecati, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum). So a Latin reader recognizes words, but not sentences. That is also why the first words of the text are usually translated as “pain itself”, although “lorem” alone is not a Latin word.

How it became the industry standard

You will often read that lorem ipsum has been used “since the 1500s”, when an unknown printer scrambled a galley of type to make a specimen book. No one has produced evidence for this. The story spread from a 1994 letter by Richard McClintock, then publications director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, to the desktop-publishing magazine Before & After. McClintock had traced the text to Cicero by looking up the rare word consectetur, but, as he told The Straight Dope, he could not locate the old type sample in which he thought he had seen it.

The documented history is more recent:

Date	Event	Evidence
45 BC	Cicero writes De finibus	Rackham’s introduction to the Loeb edition
1914	Rackham’s Latin-English edition, with “do- / lorem ipsum” split across pages 34 and 36	The 1914 edition on the Internet Archive
1960s-1970s	Letraset dry-transfer lettering sheets print lorem ipsum as sample text	Letraset sheets examined by Cibois
Desktop-publishing era	Aldus includes lorem ipsum in its PageMaker software	The Straight Dope
Today	Microsoft Word inserts it with =lorem()	Microsoft Support

In Word, typing =lorem() on its own line and pressing Enter inserts three paragraphs of it. Microsoft’s help page describes =lorem(p,l), where p is the number of paragraphs and l the number of lines in each, and notes that the feature is disabled when the AutoCorrect option Replace text as you type is turned off.

When to use lorem ipsum, and when not to

Placeholder text is a tool for testing form before content exists. It works well for:

• Wireframes and mockups where the copy is not written yet but you need to see how headings, paragraphs and columns sit together.
• Website and email templates that will be filled by a CMS or by different writers. Test with short, typical and very long text.
• Typeface and font-size choices, where real sentences would pull attention to their meaning.
• Testing limits: a product card, meta description or button label that must fit a fixed space. Generate text by Characters (up to) and see where it breaks. Our character limits cheat sheet lists common platform limits.
• Developer fixtures such as sample database rows or UI tests that need text of known length.

It works badly when the content is the design. A landing page, a form or an error message depends on what the words say, so writing draft copy, even rough, gives better feedback than Latin. Lorem ipsum also hides problems real text would show: English has longer and shorter words, headlines that wrap at awkward places and names with accents. Test with at least one real example before you sign off.

The other risk is shipping it. Placeholder text left in a live page, a printed brochure or an app store listing looks careless, and search engines index it like any other text. Before publishing, search the page or the source files for “lorem” and “ipsum”.

Getting the right amount

The most useful habit is to match the placeholder to the real content in length. A blog layout tested with one short paragraph will look different once 800-word posts arrive. A few quick guides:

• Paragraph length: see how many words are in a paragraph for typical lengths in different kinds of writing.
• Exact sizes: generate by Words or Characters (up to) in the lorem ipsum generator. With Characters (up to) the text stops at the last whole word that fits, so it never runs over the limit.
• HTML: choose Paragraphs and tick Wrap paragraphs in <p> tags to paste straight into a page. The HTML tag remover takes the tags out again.
• Check the result: paste your real copy into the word counter or character counter to compare it with the space you designed for.

Here is what the generator gives for 12 words with Start with “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” ticked (each run is different after the opening words):

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet lorem sit est fugiat commodo exercitation aliquip

And for Characters (up to) set to 80:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Est fugiat commodo.

That second result is 76 characters: the next word would have pushed it past 80, so the tool stopped and closed the sentence with a period.