Lorem Ipsum Generator - Paragraphs, Sentences or Words, Plain Text or HTML

Lorem ipsum is a scrambled adaptation of a passage from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum ('On the Ends of Good and Evil'), a work on ethics written in 45 BC. The familiar words come from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of its first book. The opening 'Lorem ipsum' is what is left of 'dolorem ipsum', Latin for 'pain itself': in section 1.10.32 Cicero writes 'neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit, amet, consectetur, adipisci velit'. The table below sets the traditional passage beside Cicero's own Latin.

The form used today is derived from Letraset transfer sheets first published in 1966. Lipsum.com says that designers at Letraset and the librarian James Mosley took a 1914 Cicero translation and scrambled it for Letraset's Body Type sheets, and that desktop publishing software such as Aldus PageMaker and Microsoft Word later included versions of the text. Wikipedia, citing the Letraset designer Dave Farey, says that Mosley supplied the text, and that the physical source may have been the 1914 Loeb Classical Library edition of De finibus. The Latin scholar Richard McClintock of Hampden-Sydney College is credited with tracing the words to Cicero by looking up the rare word 'consectetur'. He described it in a 1994 letter to John McWade, editor of the magazine Before & After, which said the text had been in use since the 1500s. Wikipedia reports that McClintock has since said that date was a guess with no evidence behind it, so treat any date before the 1960s with care.

The generator draws words from a word list. The default list is the 63 different words of the traditional passage, which gives the familiar look. You can also choose Cicero's original Latin (182 different words from the two sections), or both lists together (210 words). Sentences run from 6 to 18 words, with a comma or two in the longer ones, and paragraphs from 3 to 7 sentences. A word the tool picks is never repeated within three words of itself, so the text does not stutter (the opening of the traditional passage is printed as it stands). 'Start with Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet' makes the first sentence the 19-word opening of the traditional passage, exactly as it is usually printed.

Everything is driven by the seed. A small random number generator (mulberry32) turns the seed into the same series of choices every time, so the same seed and settings always give the same text. That helps when a designer and a developer must see identical placeholder text, or when you want to rebuild a page exactly. Press 'New text' for a fresh seed. The seed is for layout text only. It is not a secure random source. Plain text separates paragraphs with a blank line. HTML wraps each paragraph in a p tag, and nothing in the text needs escaping. You can make up to 200 paragraphs, 1,000 sentences or 10,000 words at a time.