French Lorem Ipsum Generator

About French (Français)

Speakers: 320 million speakers (native + L2).
Where it's spoken: France, Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, DRC, Madagascar, French Polynesia, and 22 other countries.
Script: Latin alphabet with extensive diacritics.
Direction: left-to-right (LTR).
Text expansion vs English: ~20% longer.
Unique characters to verify: ç, à, â, é, è, ê, ë, î, ï, ô, ù, û, ü, ÿ, æ, œ.

A short history of the Latin alphabet with extensive diacritics

French descended from Vulgar Latin and was standardised by the Académie française, founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu. The Académie remains influential — it issues recommendations on neologisms (notably resisting English loanwords), maintains the official dictionary, and has set spelling reforms (most recently the 1990 reform, partially adopted).

French has many regional varieties, but written French is heavily standardised. Major distinctions exist between European French (Metropolitan + Belgian) and Quebec French — vocabulary differs (mail = courriel in Quebec, e-mail or mail elsewhere), and Quebec preserves some 17th-century forms lost in France.

French typography for designers

French typography is famously meticulous. The most important design rule: use a non-breaking space before doubled punctuation (: ; ! ? « »). The colon, semicolon, exclamation, question marks, and French quotation marks (guillemets « ») all want a thin non-breaking space before them in proper typesetting. Skipping this is immediately visible to French readers.

French uses guillemets « like this » as primary quotation marks, not "double quotes". Smart-quote autocorrect in word processors should be set to French to handle this correctly. Apostrophes are typographic ’ not straight '. Capital letters in French historically didn't take accents (ETAT vs État) but modern usage requires them.

Fonts that render French well

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

• Inter
• Roboto
• Open Sans
• Source Sans Pro
• Noto Sans

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

Common pitfalls in French design

• Forgetting the non-breaking space before : ; ! ? « »
• Using straight "double quotes" instead of « guillemets »
• Dropping accents from capital letters (ETAT instead of ÉTAT)
• Using straight ' apostrophe instead of typographic ’
• Using English-language fonts that lack ligatures like œ and æ
• Underestimating French text expansion (~20% longer than English)

Localization tips for French

• Decide on Metropolitan French (fr-FR) vs Quebec French (fr-CA) up front
• French is ~20% longer than English on average
• Currency: € (France) or CA$ (Quebec) — never just $
• Date format: 15/03/2024 or 15 mars 2024
• Decimal separator is comma (3,14)
• Address forms differ: "Madame" / "Monsieur" are formal defaults

Why classic Latin Lorem Ipsum doesn't work for French

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 French designs, classic Latin lorem ipsum is the wrong choice:

• It uses slightly different letter frequencies and lacks French-specific characters.
• It doesn't reflect how much longer French text actually runs in your layout (~20% expansion vs English).
• Designers shown Latin placeholder cannot evaluate the visual rhythm of French on the page.
• Stakeholder reviews on Latin lorem ipsum miss layout problems that only surface with native script.

The French placeholder above uses real French 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: