Generate lorem ipsum

How it works

Placeholder text stands in for copy nobody has written yet. Setting a page with it lets you judge line length, leading, column width and the grey value of a block of type before a single sentence has been argued over. Real copy pulls attention onto the words. A paragraph of Latin keeps the eye on the setting, which is the whole trick, and it has been the trick since long before anybody had a screen to look at.

Cicero, not nonsense

The words are not invented. They come from De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, a treatise on ethics Cicero wrote in 45 BC, and specifically from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33. The argument in that stretch is that nobody wants pain for its own sake: Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit. Loosely, there is no one who loves pain because it is pain.

That sentence is where the filler begins. Break dolorem across a line and the second half reads lorem, and whoever set the type kept the fragment. Other words were damaged the same way. Adipisci velit became adipiscing elit, eius modi became eiusmod, incidunt grew a syllable into incididunt, and magnam aliquam quaerat was squeezed down to magna aliqua. The passage on the specimen sheet is a mangled quotation rather than a composed piece of writing.

How the provenance was traced

It was worked out by Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden-Sydney College, who noticed consectetur in a specimen sheet and found the word rare enough in classical Latin to serve as a fingerprint. Following it led back to Cicero. Before that the text was widely assumed to be meaningless. It reached designers through Letraset dry-transfer sheets in the 1960s and then through desktop publishing software two decades later, carrying a sixteenth-century compositor's slip into every layout program.

What this generator draws from

The pool is tokenised at load from both sources: the corrupted standard passage, and the untouched Latin of 1.10.32 and 1.10.33. That yields 210 distinct words, enough that a long piece does not visibly repeat itself. Sentence length comes from a symmetric triangular distribution between 4 and 24 words with a mode of 14, obtained by averaging two uniform draws. Paragraphs run 2 to 7 sentences on the same shape, and commas land at interior positions once a sentence passes nine words.

Uniform lengths are what gives a scramble away. The eye reads rhythm before it reads vocabulary, so a wall of identically sized sentences looks wrong at arm's length even to somebody who cannot read a word of it. Varying the lengths costs one extra random number per sentence and buys the resemblance the whole exercise depends on.

The seed, and why it matters

Every draw comes from one small deterministic generator keyed on the seed control and nothing else. Adjusting the output format, or going from four paragraphs to five, therefore leaves the text you already had exactly as it was. The stream is linear, so raising the count appends rather than reshuffles. Without that the passage would rewrite itself on every keystroke, the preview would flicker, and comparing two settings would be guesswork. Move the seed for a different passage, and write the number down to come back to this one.

When Latin is the wrong choice

Greeked text is useless in a few situations worth naming. A client presentation where somebody will try to read the page and be annoyed that they cannot. An accessibility review, since a screen reader attempts Latin in an English voice and tells you nothing about how the real content will sound. Any layout whose fit depends on the words, because German runs longer than English and Latin is a proxy for neither. The plain English setting exists for those, building grammatical but meaningless sentences from a small clause grammar.

One risk deserves its own line. Filler that reaches production is a familiar embarrassment, and because it is searchable it keeps turning up in shipped software, printed brochures and at least one court filing. English filler is much harder to spot at a glance. If a page has to be checked before it ships, Latin has the considerable advantage of being obvious.