Text styles
Bacon Ipsum Generator
Bacon ipsum replaces Cicero's Latin with cuts of meat: ribeye, pork belly, short loin, burgdoggen. Some of it keeps the Latin scaffolding of the original, which is why the classic opening reads 'bacon ipsum dolor amet' rather than anything a butcher would say.
Using it well
Bacon Ipsum Generator, in practice
It is the most purely playful variant here, and that is a real use case. A mockup that makes the room laugh gets looked at properly, and the words are so obviously wrong that nobody mistakes them for draft copy — which is exactly the failure mode readable placeholder text usually invites.
It also behaves differently from the other variants in a way worth knowing about: the output reads closer to a comma-separated list than to prose, which makes it unusually good for some components and useless for others.
- It runs wider than English, not narrower
- Bacon ipsum looks like a list of short nouns, but the words themselves are long: tenderloin, prosciutto, frankfurter, porchetta. They average about 6 letters, and only 3% of them are three letters or fewer, against about a third of words in real English. When we measured it, 100 words of bacon ipsum rendered about 12% wider than 100 words of English prose. A card that looks full with it will look sparse with real copy, so size things with standard Lorem Ipsum.
- It is a list, not prose
- Bacon ipsum strings nouns together with commas rather than building sentences with clauses. That makes it excellent for tag clouds, chip groups, ingredient lists, and any component rendering a series of short items, and poor for judging paragraph rhythm.
- A small vocabulary repeats
- Our bacon bank has 71 distinct words across its 15 source sentences, and pork, beef and ribs each turn up five times. That is plenty for a card or a menu, but across a full article layout the repetition becomes noticeable and makes the mockup feel fake. For long-form layouts, standard or hipster ipsum keep the texture more even.
- Safe for client work, with one caveat
- Because it is patently absurd, bacon ipsum almost never gets mistaken for real copy - a genuine advantage over readable variants like hipster or corporate ipsum. The caveat is audience: for a vegetarian client, a restaurant group, or anything faith-adjacent, a wall of pork is a poor opening. Read the room.
- Grep for it before you ship
- Meat vocabulary is distinctive enough that one search catches it: 'burgdoggen', 'landjaeger', and 'chislic' appear nowhere in ordinary copy. Absurd filler is easy to spot on a page you are looking at and easy to miss in a template you never open, so run the search as part of your release checks.
Other sheets
- Hipster Ipsum GeneratorGenerate hipster ipsum placeholder text full of artisanal, small-batch vocabulary. Free, instant, and copy-ready in plain text, HTML, or Markdown.
- Cupcake Ipsum GeneratorGenerate cupcake ipsum placeholder text made of desserts, sugar, and icing. Free and instant, with plain text, HTML, and Markdown output.
- Gen Z Ipsum GeneratorGenerate Gen Z ipsum placeholder text using modern internet slang. Free and instant, with plain text, HTML, and Markdown output.
Further reading
- Best Placeholder Text Alternatives to Lorem IpsumDiscover creative alternatives to traditional Lorem Ipsum text that can add personality to your design mockups and prototypes.
- Why Designers Still Use Lorem Ipsum, Even With AILorem Ipsum solves an attention problem, not a scheduling one, which is why AI-written drafts have not replaced it. What it is good for, where it misleads, and how its texture compares with real English.
- Does Lorem Ipsum Look Like English? We Measured ItThe standard claim is that Lorem Ipsum mimics the look of English. We measured word length, letter frequency, glyph coverage and rendered width against 155,000 words of real English. Some of the claim holds up. Some of it doesn't.
Generate it
The generator is at the top of this page, already set up for Bacon Ipsum.