What does lorem ipsum mean in English?

As printed, nothing. It is a real Latin passage with words cut, swapped and misspelled until it stopped meaning anything, which is the whole point of it. The original sentence underneath is about pain: Cicero is arguing that nobody wants pain for its own sake, and only pursues it when something worthwhile comes of it. Run the placeholder through a translator and you will get confident nonsense, because the translator is guessing at words that are no longer words.

Is lorem ipsum real Latin?

It is damaged Latin. Every word came from a Latin text, and a good many are still spelled correctly, so a translator recognises enough of them to try. But the grammar has been broken, words have been injected that were never in the passage, and at least one is not a Latin word at all. Treat it as Latin-shaped rather than Latin.

Why does it start in the middle of a word?

Because the original word was dolorem, and the first two letters were cut off. The passage begins "Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet". Chop the do and you are left with "lorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet", which is where the standard opening comes from. It is a printer's off-cut that became a convention.

Is it consectetur or consectetuer?

Both are in circulation and only consectetur is a real Latin word. Consectetuer is a typo that entered the chain somewhere in the twentieth century, was copied into desktop publishing software, and is now embedded in thousands of templates. Neither is wrong in the sense that matters, because the text is meaningless either way. If you want the version closest to Cicero, use consectetur.

Who worked out where lorem ipsum came from?

Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He noticed that consectetur is an uncommon word, went looking for it in classical literature, and traced the whole passage to sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero. Before that the standard story was that an unnamed sixteenth-century printer had scrambled a galley of type, which nobody had ever checked.

Is lorem ipsum bad for SEO?

Only if you ship it. Placeholder text on a page you have not published costs nothing. Placeholder text on a live page is a page with no content on it, and it will be treated as one: nothing to rank for, nothing to match a query against, and a poor impression on anyone who lands there. The damage is that the page is empty, not that the words are Latin. Search your templates for lorem before a release.

Should I use lorem ipsum or real copy in a design?

Filler first, real copy as soon as you have any. Lorem ipsum is good at one job, which is letting you judge shape without being distracted by wording. It is bad at everything after that, because real headlines run longer and less evenly than filler, and real copy changes what the page needs to be. A design signed off on lorem ipsum tends to break the week the writing arrives.

What lorem ipsum is, and what it says

Where the Latin came from, what the passage underneath it actually argues, why the first word is missing two letters, and when filler is the wrong choice.

Free toolLorem Ipsum GeneratorPlaceholder copy by the word, sentence, paragraph or character, in classic Latin or plain English. Counts what it made.Open the generator

The short answer

Lorem ipsum is a Latin passage from Cicero, written in 45 BC, scrambled until it stopped meaning anything. It comes from de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, "On the Extremes of Good and Evil", sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33. Designers use it because text that means nothing lets you look at a layout instead of reading it.

What the passage actually says

The original is an argument about pleasure and pain. Cicero writes that no one wants pain for its own sake, and that a person only takes on hardship when something worth having comes out of it. It is a piece of moral philosophy, and it has nothing to do with printing, typesetting or design.

The line the placeholder is cut from begins "Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet". Roughly: there is no one who loves pain itself simply because it is pain. Two thousand years later it is the most reproduced sentence in graphic design, and almost nobody who sets it knows it is about suffering.

Why the first word is broken

Lorem is not a word. The original is dolorem, and whoever first cut the passage down to fill a type specimen started partway through it, losing the do. The text has been copied from that cut ever since, so every mockup on earth opens on the back half of a Latin word for pain.

The rest of the passage got the same treatment. Words were dropped, reordered and injected, which is why running it through a translator produces confident nonsense rather than Cicero. There is nothing coherent left to translate.

How it was traced

For most of the twentieth century the accepted story was that an unnamed printer in the 1500s scrambled a galley of type to make a specimen book, and that the result survived. That explanation was repeated for decades without anyone testing it.

Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, found the real source. He noticed that consectetur is an uncommon word in classical Latin, went looking for it, and landed on the Cicero passage. The 1500s printer may well have existed; the text he was setting was Cicero either way.

How it reached every computer

Two products carried it. In the 1960s Letraset printed it on dry-transfer lettering sheets, the rub-down sheets designers used to set headlines by hand, which put the same paragraph on the desk of every studio that bought one. In the 1980s Aldus PageMaker shipped it as the default sample text, and desktop publishing did the rest.

That is why the wording is so consistent. Nearly every generator working today, this one included, is reproducing a paragraph that was standardised by two pieces of commercial stationery.

Consectetur, or consectetuer

You will see both, and only consectetur is a Latin word. Consectetuer is a typo that entered the chain in the twentieth century and was then baked into software defaults, so it now appears in thousands of templates and a fair number of generators.

It makes no practical difference, because the text is meaningless in both spellings. It is worth knowing only when you are trying to work out which generator a block of filler came from, where the spelling is a useful fingerprint.

Ways to get filler without a generator

A web tool is not the fastest route in every app. Several of the places you would paste it can produce it themselves.

Where	How	Control you get
Microsoft Word	Type `=lorem()` and press Enter. `=lorem(3,5)` gives three paragraphs of five sentences	Paragraphs and sentences
Word, in English	Type `=rand()` instead, for readable English sample text	Paragraphs and sentences
VS Code and most editors	Type `lorem` and press Tab. `lorem50` gives fifty words. This is Emmet, so it works in HTML files without an extension	Words
Figma and Sketch	A plugin. Neither ships one built in	Depends on the plugin
Google Docs	Nothing built in. It needs an add-on, or a paste from elsewhere	None
A terminal	Ruby, Python and Node all have a faker package	Whatever you write
The browser	The generator on this site	Paragraphs, sentences, words or characters

Word's =lorem() is genuinely the quickest option if you are already in Word. The editor route is the quickest if you are already in code. A web tool wins when you need a specific length, a specific format, or text you can see the size of before you take it.

The joke ipsums, and when they help

There is a small industry of themed generators: meat, hipster, corporate jargon, film dialogue. They are funny once and they are useful twice, in a narrow way. Filler that is readable gets read, and a stakeholder who reads the filler will comment on the filler instead of the layout.

That cuts both ways. If your reviewer keeps asking what the Latin means, readable filler removes the question. If your reviewer keeps critiquing the placeholder copy, Latin puts it back. Plain English filler, which the generator here offers as a second flavour, sits between the two: ordinary words, no meaning, nothing to react to.

When not to use it at all

Filler answers one question, which is whether the shape works. It cannot tell you whether the page works, because that depends on words nobody has written yet. Two things go wrong when a design lives on lorem ipsum too long.

Real text is uneven. Filler produces sentences of similar length in a reliable rhythm. Real headlines run to one word or to twelve, and real paragraphs come in clumps. A layout tuned to filler often falls apart on the first real page.
Real text changes the brief. Writing a page tends to reveal that it needs a section nobody drew, or that two boxes should be one. That discovery is lost if the copy arrives after sign-off.

The practical middle is to fill the page once so you can see it, then replace one section at a time with something true, starting with the headline. And check for stragglers before you ship: a grep for lorem across your templates takes a second and has saved a lot of people a lot of embarrassment.