"Lorem ipsum" isn't nonsense invented for design use — it's a garbled, rearranged excerpt from a genuine 1st-century BC Latin text, Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum ("On the Ends of Good and Evil"), written around 45 BC. The commonly told history is that a 16th-century typesetter scrambled a passage from it to create sample text for a type specimen book, and it stuck around for centuries afterward — which is why the words look convincingly language-like (they're built from real Latin roots and word endings) without forming coherent Latin sentences once rearranged.
The three unit options aren't just about total length — they change the internal structure of what you get. "Paragraphs" produces multiple line breaks and varied sentence lengths, closer to how body copy actually reads. "Sentences" gives a continuous, denser block, useful for testing a single text container like a card description or a tooltip. "Words" is the most granular option, useful when a design has a hard character or word limit — a headline, a button label, a meta description — and you need placeholder text that respects that exact constraint rather than an arbitrary paragraph.
It lets designers and developers preview how a layout will look with realistic amounts of text before real content is ready, without the distraction of reading actual words.
Traditionally it's meant to look like real text at a glance without being readable, so viewers focus on layout and typography rather than the words themselves.
Yes — switch the unit to "Words" and enter the exact number you need.