Thai Lorem Ipsum Generator

About Thai (ภาษาไทย)

Speakers: 70 million native speakers.
Where it's spoken: Thailand and Thai diaspora.
Script: Thai script — abugida derived from Old Khmer; 44 consonants, 15 vowel symbols, 4 tone marks.
Direction: left-to-right (LTR).
Text expansion vs English: ~5% more compact.
Unique characters to verify: Vowels positioned around consonants (above, below, before, after); tone marks stacked above; numerals (๐-๙).

A short history of the Thai script — abugida derived from Old Khmer; 44 consonants, 15 vowel symbols, 4 tone marks

Thai script was created in 1283 by King Ramkhamhaeng, who adapted the Old Khmer alphabet to Thai phonetics. The script has 44 consonants (some redundant, reflecting tonal class history), 15 basic vowel symbols, and 4 tone marks. Thai is tonal — five distinct tones — and the script encodes tone through a combination of consonant class and tone marks.

Thai typography for designers

Thai typography has two unique challenges. First, vowels can position above, below, before, or after their consonant. The vowel "ai" (ไ) appears before its consonant in writing but is pronounced after — "ไก่" (chicken) is read as "k-ai" not "ai-k". Second, Thai has no spaces between words — line breaks happen at word boundaries that browsers must determine algorithmically. Setting word-break: keep-all with proper Thai dictionary support is necessary for clean wrapping.

Thai also stacks tone marks above vowels above consonants — three layers of vertical complexity. Line-height must be generous to avoid clipping. Modern Thai web fonts like Sarabun, Prompt, and IBM Plex Sans Thai are designed for screen readability.

Fonts that render Thai well

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

• Noto Sans Thai
• Sarabun
• Prompt
• Kanit
• IBM Plex Sans Thai

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

Common pitfalls in Thai design

• Tight line-height clipping stacked tone marks
• Browser line-break splitting words mid-syllable (no spaces makes wrapping hard)
• Using a Latin font with no Thai glyphs — text disappears
• Forgetting Thai numerals (๐-๙) for traditional or formal contexts
• Treating string length as visual width — Thai vowels can sit on the same column as their consonant

Localization tips for Thai

• Thai uses no spaces between words — text-justify and word-break behavior need testing
• Set line-height to at least 1.6 for stacked Thai diacritics
• Thai text is about 95% the length of equivalent English
• Currency: ฿ (Thai baht)
• Date format: 15/03/2567 — Thai uses the Buddhist calendar (year + 543)
• Western numerals (0-9) are standard in modern Thai UIs; Thai numerals (๐-๙) for formal/traditional contexts

Why classic Latin Lorem Ipsum doesn't work for Thai

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

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

The Thai placeholder above uses real Thai 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: