Lorem ipsum placeholder text

Where lorem ipsum comes from

The text is a mangled passage from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil), written in 45 BC. The original, in sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33, begins “Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet”: roughly, nor is there anyone who loves pain itself because it is pain. In the placeholder version, words are cut, dropped and shuffled. “Lorem” is the tail of “dolorem”, and the result reads like Latin without meaning anything.

Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden-Sydney College, traced the source. Many sites repeat that printers have used the text since the 1500s, but the firm record starts in the 1960s with Letraset's dry-transfer lettering sheets. In the mid-1980s Aldus put it into the templates of PageMaker, one of the first desktop publishing programs, and from there it spread into word processors and design tools.

Why designers use fake Latin

Real sentences invite reading. Show a layout with real words and people start editing the copy instead of judging the design. Lorem ipsum looks like text, with a natural mix of short and long words, capitals and full stops, so a column fills the way real writing will, and you can judge line length, spacing and where the lines break.

It has limits. Real copy is rarely the length the designer guessed, and some languages run longer than English, so test the layout with the actual text before launch. Headings, buttons and menus deserve realistic words from the start, since their length decides the design. And in user tests, placeholder text leaves people guessing what a page is for.

That is why many teams use lorem ipsum for early wireframes and quick layout checks, then switch to draft copy of the expected length, in the right language, as soon as there is any.

What Insert gives you

Every insert starts with the familiar opening, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.”, and continues with sentences made at random from the words of the classic passage. Each paragraph has four to six sentences of 7 to 14 words, beginning with a capital and ending with a full stop. Three paragraphs come separated by an empty line, ready for a layout.

Only the words of the classic passage are used, so no stray English word pulls a reviewer's eye, and because sentence lengths vary, lines end unevenly the way real text does. Insert again for more: each insert is a new mix, so a long page does not repeat itself, apart from that opening line. To hit a set length, such as a 150-word product description, insert more than you need and delete from the end while you watch the word count. Insert also has Today's date and Date and time, handy for mock letters and invoices.

Before you publish

Placeholder text left in a live page, a printed brochure or an app store listing is a classic slip. Before anything goes out, search the final text for “lorem” with Ctrl F, in Text Studio or in the program that holds the layout. Screen readers read lorem ipsum aloud as nonsense, one more reason not to leave it in anything people will use. Some editors mark missing copy with TK, short for “to come”, instead, precisely because a search for those two letters finds every gap.

If you work in Microsoft Word, typing =lorem() and pressing Enter inserts placeholder paragraphs there, and =rand() inserts English sample text. Text Studio is handy when the filler is headed somewhere else: a web page, a design file, a form you are testing.