Free Lorem Ipsum Generator

A quick history and when not to use it

The passage isn't actually gibberish. It's a scrambled fragment of Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum ("On the Ends of Good and Evil"), written around 45 BC. The opening "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" is a mangling of dolorem ipsum — "pain itself" — clipped at the page break in a 1500s printer's specimen. Compositors kept setting the same broken sample for centuries because Latin's character distribution (few double‑letters, moderate word lengths) approximates English closely enough to preview typography without any real English word grabbing the eye.

That last property is why it works: designers evaluating a layout will read English content instead of judging the visual rhythm. The problem is the opposite for usability testing — Lorem ipsum makes the layout look better than real content does, because real text has long words, ALL CAPS product names, three‑digit prices, and headlines that break awkwardly. If you're stress‑testing a design, use content from an actual source (a Wikipedia paragraph, a real product description) instead of ipsum. Reserve ipsum for visual/typographic mockups, not UX flow reviews.

Counts here are exact — asking for 50 words gives exactly 50 words, punctuation excluded from the count, sentences ending at natural boundaries. Character mode counts every rendered character including spaces, useful when filling a fixed‑length database field for smoke testing.