Statistics Based Lorem Ipsum Generator

Comments:: 1

Tags:: Statistics; PHP; Fun; Code Snippet

By Jesse Donat on: Sep. 22, 2010 (Updated: Sep. 16, 2024)

It strikes me now, many years later, that what I'd built was essentially a PHP markov chain

Several months ago I was wondering to myself if you could detect patterns in a list of words and then use those patterns to generate a new list of fake “words”. A kind of a flavored Lorem Ipsum generator, where I could change the feel of the sentences by switching out the data set. I’m sure thousands of developers have done this before me – but it was a fun thought experiment.

I threw together a little script in PHP to test the idea, and the results were kind of interesting so I figured I'd throw it on my site - Anyway, here are some examples in action – you can hit reload for a random ipsum! The code and a sample dataset are below.

Faux English Demo

Faux Latin-y English Demo

Faux Japanese Demo

You need to supply a set of words for it to base the pattern off - here is my sample dataset.

Comment by: Daniel Moss-Colodny on Mar. 7, 2025

I love it! It's the perfect tool to generate "word salad" for traumatized NPCs! Adding it to my personal database of tools