Chinese Lorem Ipsum Generator

About Chinese (中文)

Speakers: 1.3 billion native speakers.
Where it's spoken: China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and overseas Chinese communities.
Script: Han characters (汉字 / 漢字).
Direction: left-to-right (LTR).
Text expansion vs English: ~50% more compact.
Unique characters to verify: Simplified (汉字) and Traditional (漢字) variants; full-width punctuation (，。？！).

A short history of the Han characters

Chinese has the longest continuous written tradition of any living language — characters in modern use can be traced to oracle-bone inscriptions from c. 1200 BC. The script is logographic: each character represents a morpheme, not a sound. Mainland China and Singapore use Simplified characters (introduced in the 1950s); Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau use Traditional. Most modern fonts ship both, but you must explicitly choose between SC (Simplified Chinese) and TC (Traditional Chinese) when localising.

Chinese typography for designers

Chinese typography is fundamentally different from Latin script. Every character occupies a fixed-width square (the em-square), so text wraps cleanly at almost any character boundary — there are no spaces between words. This makes line-break logic simple but also means traditional concepts like "kerning" don't apply. Vertical typesetting is occasionally used for traditional contexts; most modern web design is horizontal LTR.

Punctuation in Chinese is full-width (each mark occupies a full character cell): the comma is "，" not ",". Mixing full-width and half-width punctuation looks unprofessional and is one of the most common localization errors.

Fonts that render Chinese well

For web designs targeting Chinese-language audiences, these fonts have proven Chinese support:

• Noto Sans SC / TC
• Source Han Sans
• PingFang SC
• Hiragino Sans GB
• Microsoft YaHei
• SimSun

Always provide an explicit Chinese-supporting font in your CSS font-family stack — relying on browser fallbacks produces inconsistent rendering across operating systems.

Common pitfalls in Chinese design

• Using a Latin font that has no Chinese characters — browser falls back, breaking visual hierarchy
• Mixing Simplified and Traditional characters in the same text
• Using half-width punctuation (.,!?) instead of full-width (。，！？)
• Setting letter-spacing for Chinese (it spaces every character; usually undesirable)
• Forgetting that Chinese text wraps at every character — designs that rely on word-level wrapping break

Localization tips for Chinese

• Choose between Simplified (Mainland China, Singapore) and Traditional (Taiwan, HK, Macau) up front — don't mix
• Chinese text is roughly half the length of equivalent English, so UI components shrink by 30–50%
• Names traditionally appear surname-first in Chinese — adjust form fields accordingly
• Numbers and dates are usually written with Western numerals (1, 2, 3) but you'll see Chinese numerals (一, 二, 三) in formal contexts
• Color symbolism differs: red = celebratory/lucky (don't use for errors); white = funeral

Why classic Latin Lorem Ipsum doesn't work for Chinese

The classic Lorem Ipsum is a corrupted Latin passage from Cicero. It's perfect for Latin-script designs because it produces letter and word lengths that look like real text. But for Chinese designs, classic Latin lorem ipsum is the wrong choice:

• It uses Latin script, so it can't reveal Chinese font rendering issues.
• It doesn't have the character widths and word lengths typical of real Chinese.
• Designers shown Latin placeholder cannot evaluate the visual rhythm of Chinese on the page.
• Stakeholder reviews on Latin lorem ipsum miss layout problems that only surface with native script.

The Chinese placeholder above uses real Chinese words and characters, so what you see in the mockup is what you'll see in production.

Lorem Ipsum in other languages

Designing for multiple locales? We have placeholder generators for 19 other languages: