Where Lorem Ipsum comes from
Lorem Ipsum is derived from 'de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum' (On the Ends of Good and Evil), a philosophical text written by Cicero in 45 BC. The scrambled version used today was popularized by typesetter Letraset in the 1960s for their dry-transfer sheets.
The text starts with 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit...' This scrambled Latin has a natural-looking distribution of word lengths and spacing that resembles actual English text, which is exactly why it works as a placeholder — it looks like real text at a glance without being readable.
Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar, traced the origin in 1994 and confirmed it comes from Cicero's work, showing the passage has been used in typesetting for over 500 years.
When to use placeholder text
Placeholder text is most useful in the early stages of design and development, when you need to communicate layout and visual hierarchy before real content is written. Filling a design with actual content too early leads to feedback about the content rather than the layout.
Using 'real sounding but meaningless' text like Lorem Ipsum prevents clients and stakeholders from reading placeholder text and treating it as final. It signals clearly that the content is temporary.
Some designers prefer using real content from the start to ensure layouts work with actual word lengths and paragraph sizes. Both approaches have merit — Lorem Ipsum is a tool, not a rule.
Generating Lorem Ipsum with the online tool
The Irreva Lorem Ipsum Generator creates placeholder text by paragraph, sentence, or word count. You can generate a few sentences for a button caption or multiple paragraphs for a full article layout.
Options include the classic Latin Lorem Ipsum or custom alternatives for specialized contexts. Copy the generated text with one click and paste directly into your design tool, code, or document.
For developers, inserting Lorem Ipsum directly into code is common during UI development. Many text editors and IDEs have Lorem Ipsum snippets or plugins (Emmet's 'lorem' shorthand in HTML, for example). The online generator is useful when you need text outside your editor.