What does lorem ipsum mean, and where does it come from?

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit…” appears in design mock-ups, website templates and unfinished documents everywhere. It looks like Latin and almost is. It is filler text, chosen so that a reader sees the shape of the words without being distracted by their meaning.

Where it comes from

The text is a scrambled extract from De finibus bonorum et malorum (“On the ends of good and evil”), a philosophical work by Cicero written in 45 BC. The original passage discusses pain and pleasure: roughly, that nobody loves pain for its own sake. “Lorem” is a fragment of “dolorem”, pain, cut off when the passage was chopped up. Words were dropped, altered and rearranged, so the familiar version is not real Latin and has no meaning as a whole.

It is often claimed that printers have used it since the 1500s, but that claim is not well supported. Its wide use is well documented from the 1960s, when it appeared on dry-transfer lettering sheets, and it spread further with desktop publishing software from the 1980s onwards.

Why designers use it

• It has a natural mix of word lengths, so a layout looks realistic.
• Nobody reads it, so reviewers look at the design rather than editing the copy.
• It is clearly placeholder, so readers do not mistake it for final wording.

Generate it

The Lorem Ipsum Generator produces placeholder text by paragraphs, sentences, words or list items. Choose an amount close to the real content you expect, which the Word Counter can help you estimate from an existing page.

The risks

• It hides content problems. A layout designed around three neat lines of lorem ipsum may break when the real headline is two words or twenty.
• It gets published. Search the web for the phrase and you will find live pages, product listings and even printed signs that went out with placeholder text.
• It delays the hard part. Writing the content is often what decides whether a page works; leaving it to the end leads to rushed copy.

Better habits

• Use real or realistic draft copy whenever it exists, even if rough.
• Test layouts with very short and very long versions of each text.
• Before launch, search the site and documents for “lorem” and “ipsum”.
• For data-heavy designs, use realistic placeholder data: names of varied lengths, prices with different digit counts, long email addresses.

What the passage actually says

The original sentences from Cicero, before they were scrambled, say in essence that no one loves, seeks or wants pain for its own sake, but that circumstances sometimes arise in which toil and pain can bring some great pleasure. A fitting thought for anyone waiting on final copy.

Other languages

Lorem ipsum approximates the look of European languages. For designs in Arabic, Hindi, Chinese or other scripts, use placeholder text in that script, because line height, word length and text direction all change the layout.