When you’re putting together the design for a website, or something of that sort, it’s often helpful to put “dummy text” where content would eventually go. This allows you to get a better picture of what it will look like when you finish.

The most common dummy text is a pseudo-Latin paragraph beginning with “Lorem ipsum.” It looks something like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus magna. Cras in mi at felis aliquet congue. Ut a est eget ligula molestie gravida. Curabitur massa.

Nonsensical, yes, but that’s the point. Since the 1500s or so, typesetters have used Lorem Ipsum text because it has fairly realistic spacing, rather than just repeating “This is filler text” over and over again and ending up with a block of text that doesn’t look quite natural, and because the text is nonsensical enough that the content won’t pose as a distraction from the design of the letters.

There are plenty of places to get dummy text. A couple of may favorites are

• HTML Ipsum – Several snippets ready for copy/paste.
  
• Lorem Ipsum – A dummy text generator. Pick the amount of text you need, and how it should be formatted, then copy/paste the result.