Lorem ipsum

The words are the real ones: the Latin of Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum, as garbled by a fifteenth-century typesetter and used as filler ever since. Sentences are built by drawing words at random, four to sixteen of them, with commas dropped in at plausible places and a full stop at the end; paragraphs hold three to seven sentences. Start with “Lorem ipsum” opens the first paragraph with the traditional first line, which is what most people expect to see and what makes filler recognisable as filler.

That last point is the reason to use Latin at all. Placeholder text is meant to look like text without being read: Latin gives the right texture of word lengths while making it obvious that nothing here means anything. Use English words is there for the times you need to show a client something in their own language — but it is the more dangerous choice, because English filler has a way of surviving into production, and nobody notices until a customer reads it.

Plain gives paragraphs separated by a blank line. HTML wraps them in <p>, or in a <ul> for list items. Markdown separates paragraphs by blank lines and writes list items with a leading dash. Nothing is escaped because nothing in the text needs escaping — the wordlist holds letters only.

Every press of Again draws again: the text is random, not stored, and there is no seed, so the same settings give different words each time. It is generated in this tab, the page makes no network requests, and nothing is kept; the Dark button keeps its own setting in this browser's local storage.