Dummy Text (Lorem Ipsum) Generator

How to use

Choose a language under “Text type”, choose “Paragraphs”, “Sentences” or “Words” under “Unit”, enter a “Count”, and the text appears under “Result”. The starting settings are “Latin (classic Lorem Ipsum)”, “Paragraphs” and 3. Next to “Result” you can see how many characters the text has.

• With “Start with the fixed opening sentence” on, the first sentence is always the set sentence for that text type. For the “Words” unit it is locked, with the note “This option doesn’t apply to word units.”
• “Seed (optional)” can be left empty. When it is, you get new text every time you press “Regenerate”.

Units and counts

Paragraphs suit body copy, sentences suit card descriptions and list items, and words suit buttons, menus and short headings. Paragraph and sentence lengths are picked at random within their ranges each time, so the character count varies from one run to the next even when the count is the same.

Count limits and input adjustment: A number outside the range for the unit is replaced by the nearest allowed value. The maximum is 50 for paragraphs, 300 for sentences and 3,000 for words, and 0 or an empty field counts as 1. The number shown in the field is corrected to the value actually used when you leave the field. If you type 300 under “Sentences” and then switch to “Paragraphs”, the field still says 300, but 50 paragraphs are generated.

Text types

Each of the six types draws words at random from its own fixed word list.

The Latin type shuffles the 62 words found in the widely used Lorem Ipsum passage. After the fixed opening sentence it doesn’t follow the order of the original passage. The other five types each use 40 everyday nouns from that language, such as cloud, window and letter.

Japanese dummy text has no spaces between words, just like real Japanese writing, and uses 、 and 。 where a comma and a period would go. Set “Unit” to “Words” with a count of 5 and you get an unbroken string like 道公園学校机季節. German dummy text uses nouns only, so every word starts with a capital letter.

Latin Lorem Ipsum and language-specific dummy text

Lorem Ipsum is a passage of meaningless Latin made by scrambling sentences from Book 1 of De finibus bonorum et malorum by the Roman philosopher Cicero. Print, web and app mockups use it as placeholder text to show type size, line spacing and layout before the real copy is ready. The text is meaningless on purpose: give people something readable and they look at the words, not the layout.

Lorem Ipsum in Latin letters can’t show you what a screen filled with Hangul, Chinese characters or kana will look like. Japanese has no spaces and can wrap after any character, and a single Hangul, Chinese or kana character takes up more width than a single Latin letter, so the same number of characters fills a different amount of space. In tight spots such as buttons and cards, you have to try dummy text in the language you will actually ship to find where text gets cut off or wraps awkwardly.

Recreating the same text with a seed

Type anything into “Seed (optional)” and that value fixes the order in which words are drawn. The same seed with the same settings gives the same text on another day or another device. That helps when a mockup should show the same filler every time you reopen it, or when you want a colleague to generate identical text from nothing but the seed.

With the seed demo, “Unit” set to “Words” and “Count” set to 5, the types give these results.

With the seed left empty, words are drawn using the browser’s random numbers. Text made this way can’t be recreated later, so if you need to keep using it, copy it or generate it with a seed.