What is Lorem Ipsum, and should you use it?

Where it comes from

Lorem ipsum is corrupted Latin, taken from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum, written in 45 BC: a treatise on the theory of ethics.

The passage begins Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet: "nor is there anyone who loves pain itself because it is pain". The familiar opening Lorem ipsum is the tail of dolorem ipsum with the first syllable lost.

The standard account is that a printer in the 1500s scrambled a galley of type to make a specimen book, and the result was copied forward for four hundred years, through Letraset transfer sheets in the 1960s, into desktop publishing in the 1980s, and into every design tool since.

Whether the printer story is literally true is not settled. The text's use as a type specimen from the mid-twentieth century onward certainly is.

Why nonsense is the point

Placeholder text has one job: let the eye judge typography, spacing and layout without reading.

Real text defeats this. Anyone looking at a mockup with real copy on it starts reading the copy: the client comments on the wording, the designer notices a typo, and nobody looks at the line length. Latin-shaped nonsense keeps attention on the page as an object.

The word-length distribution is close enough to English that the texture and rhythm look right, which is why replacing it with asdf asdf asdf does not work: the greyness of the block is wrong and the layout lies to you.

When to use something else

When the length is the design problem. If real headlines will run to eight words and your placeholder runs to three, the design is being tested against a fiction. Match the length you will actually have.

When the language is not Latin-alphabet. Lorem ipsum tells you nothing about a layout that will hold Arabic, Japanese or Hindi. Line height, reading direction and character width are all different, and a design that only ever saw Latin breaks on contact.

When you are testing readability rather than layout. Real prose, or a diverse sample, is the only way to see whether a face is comfortable at length.

When it might ship. It happens constantly. Lorem ipsum has appeared in printed newspapers, on product packaging, and in television broadcasts. If there is any chance the placeholder reaches production, use something that fails loudly (repeated PLACEHOLDER) DO NOT SHIP is ugly and has never been mistaken for finished copy.

When a client will see it. Some clients find it alienating and some find it evasive. Plain-English filler that describes the content: "three lines about delivery times here", communicates the intent better.

Getting the amount right

The common mistake is generating a wall of it and dropping it everywhere. Placeholder text should be roughly the length of the real thing:

• Headline: 5–10 words. Not a paragraph.
• Standfirst or lede: 20–30 words.
• Body paragraph: 40–80 words, and vary them, real writing does.
• Button or label: one or two words, and check the longest realistic case.

A button reading Submit and one reading Continue to payment are different design problems.

Design that only ever sees average-length content breaks on the extremes. Testing with the longest and shortest plausible content finds more layout bugs than any amount of filler in between.

The variants

Classic lorem ipsum: the Cicero text, everywhere.

Themed generators: bacon, cupcakes, corporate jargon, pirate. Amusing once, and they defeat the purpose: readable English pulls the eye back into reading.

Structured filler: placeholder with real headings, lists and links in plausible proportions. More useful than paragraphs of prose for anything with structure to it.

Language-appropriate filler: the right answer for non-Latin layouts.