Lorem Ipsum and Placeholder Text

Where Lorem Ipsum Comes From

The familiar "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…" is a scrambled excerpt from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum ("On the Ends of Good and Evil"), written in 45 BC. Words were cut and altered: "lorem" is the end of "dolorem", split across a line in the original passage. The result looks like Latin but does not read as Latin.

Printers used such filler for a long time. It became widespread in the 1960s through Letraset dry-transfer sheets, and in the 1980s desktop publishing programs such as Aldus PageMaker shipped with it. In the 1990s the Latin scholar Richard McClintock traced the text back to Cicero. Because the source is more than two thousand years old, the text is free to use.

Why Designers Use Placeholder Text

Readable text pulls attention: in a review, people start commenting on the wording instead of the layout. Lorem ipsum has a natural mix of short and long words and no meaning, so the eye sees lines, paragraphs and weight rather than sentences. That makes it useful for:

• early layout and typography decisions: column width, line height, font size;
• templates and components that will later hold content from many authors;
• testing how a page behaves with very short and very long text in the same slot.

When Placeholder Text Misleads

Lorem ipsum is the same length wherever you paste it, and real content is not. Common surprises:

• Headlines and buttons written later are longer or shorter than the filler and break the layout. Test the shortest and the longest realistic text, not an average.
• Names, addresses and prices have shapes of their own: a double-barrelled surname, a 30-character street name, a price with a currency symbol and thousands separators.
• Translations are often longer than English, and short labels can double in length. German compound words do not break across lines unless they are hyphenated.
• Real structure brings lists, links, quotes and headings that a block of lorem ipsum never shows.

For usability tests, use realistic text. Participants cannot judge whether a page makes sense, or find information on it, when the information is Latin filler.

Placeholder Text in Other Languages

A layout that works with Latin letters can fail with other scripts. Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces between words, so lines break between almost any two characters, with rules that keep certain punctuation off the start of a line. Korean puts spaces between word units but has many more syllable shapes per line. Each of these needs fonts that contain its characters, and if the chosen font lacks them, the browser substitutes another one with different widths and line heights.

That is why the LeedyBox generator also produces Korean, Japanese and Chinese placeholder text. For a site in several languages, test each layout with text in the target script, not with lorem ipsum.

Better Placeholders for Different Jobs

Test-data libraries such as Faker can generate believable names, addresses and dates in many languages for prototypes and automated tests.

Before You Publish

Placeholder text left on a live page looks careless, and it gives readers and search engines nothing. Before launch:

• search the code and the content system for "lorem", "ipsum" and other markers your team uses, such as "TODO" or "TBD";
• check the places nobody reads in a review: page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, empty-state messages and email templates;
• listen to a page with a screen reader once; filler text and missing labels are much easier to notice by ear.

Frequently Asked Questions