Anyone who has ever seen a website mockup, a poster or a document template has run into the same sentence: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit…” It looks like Latin, poses as coherent text, yet means nothing. Let us explain what lorem ipsum is, how it emerged from a work two thousand years old and why AI is now replacing it more and more.

What lorem ipsum is

Lorem ipsum is placeholder text, that is, temporary filler that stands in for the real content in a design while the content is not yet ready. Graphic designers, typesetters and web designers use it to show how a page will look without having to possess the final copy.

The key point is that lorem ipsum means nothing. It is deliberately scrambled and garbled Latin that cannot be translated coherently. And that is intentional: the text should look realistic without drawing attention through its meaning.

Where it comes from

Even though the text makes no sense, its origin is surprisingly lofty. It comes from the Roman philosopher Cicero’s On the Ends of Good and Evil (De finibus bonorum et malorum) from 45 BC, from a passage about pain and pleasure. The phrase “lorem ipsum” itself came from the Latin “dolorem ipsum” (pain itself), just with the beginning cut off.

How did philosophy become filler? According to the traditional story, as early as the 16th century an unknown printer scrambled and distorted Cicero’s text to create a type specimen book. The text thus became the standard filler in printing. In the 1960s it was popularised by Letraset dry-transfer sheets (sheets from which letters were transferred onto paper) and in the 1980s by Aldus PageMaker, a pioneer of desktop publishing that offered it as sample text. That is how lorem ipsum entered the digital world, where it lives to this day.

A closing curiosity about its origin: that it is in fact Cicero was only uncovered in the 1980s by the Latin scholar Richard McClintock, when he noticed the unusual word consectetur and traced its source.

Why it is used at all

Why fill a design with nonsense when real text could be used? The reason is practical:

  • It does not distract. When a client or designer sees real text, they start reading and judging the content. Lorem ipsum keeps attention on what a design is about: layout, typography, colours and spacing.
  • It looks realistic. Unlike repeated “text text text”, lorem ipsum has a distribution of word and sentence lengths similar to a real language. The design thus feels like an actual page, not a broken template.
  • It lets you work without finished content. Design and copywriting often run in parallel. Filler allows the layout to be designed before the final texts exist.

Where lorem ipsum falls short

Filler text has its downsides too, and they are increasingly visible today:

  • It sometimes survives onto the finished site. More than one page, e-shop, even a printed brochure went out into the world with lorem ipsum someone forgot to replace. It looks unprofessional.
  • It does not match reality. Latin has no Slovak diacritics, different word lengths and no real tone. A design that looks perfect with lorem ipsum may fall apart with real text, for example when headings suddenly turn out twice as long.
  • It postpones working with content. The modern content-first approach argues that content should shape the form, not the other way around. Designing around a fabrication means tackling the real content only at the end, when the layout is already hard to change.

How AI is replacing lorem ipsum

And here comes the change. Instead of meaningless Latin, artificial intelligence can now generate realistic filler text to measure in seconds. The difference is fundamental:

  • The right language and tone. AI writes filler directly in your language, in the brand’s style. So instead of “lorem ipsum”, a bakery mockup shows sample product names and descriptions that look like a finished site.
  • A realistic length. You say how long the headings, descriptions or paragraphs should be, and you immediately see how the design behaves with real text length, not random Latin.
  • A basis for the final content. While lorem ipsum is thrown away entirely, an AI draft often serves as a first version of the real copy that just needs editing. It saves the designer and copywriter time.

The tools for this are already a common part of design and web programs: plugins that fill a design at the press of a button with contextual text (and increasingly images too) generated by AI. How to get a good result out of such tools is covered in how to use AI chatbots, and what is behind them is explained by what a large language model is.

The important thing is not to repeat the old mistake in a new coat: AI filler is still just filler. Before you launch a site, the content must be reviewed, verified and refined by a human. AI is a great helper here, not a replacement for thought-through content, as we also point out in AI: a good servant, a bad master.

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When designing your website, we work with realistic content in your language, so you see how the page will actually look, not as an abstract template. The result is a site that fits the content and the brand.

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Summary

Lorem ipsum is scrambled Latin from a work by Cicero that has served for centuries as filler text in printing and later in digital design. Its job is to show form without distracting with content. Today, however, it is increasingly replaced by artificial intelligence, which can generate realistic filler directly in your language and tone, moving design closer to real content. But whether you reach for Latin or AI, one thing holds: filler is always temporary and has no place on a finished website.

This article is part of our Software and system overview.