What is “Lorem Ipsum”?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text (meaning the purpose is visual formatting, not actual content), used in the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 15th century, when an unknown printer took a collection of letters and scrambled them to create a type specimen book.

It has survived not only five centuries but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It gained popularity in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and later with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker which also included versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Where does it come from?

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Professor Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, discovered its origins when he was looking up the obscure Latin word “consectetur” in a Lorem Ipsum passage. Through his investigation, he found an undeniable source.

It turns out that the words of Lorem Ipsum come from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by the Roman philosopher Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a lengthy treatise on ethics and was very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” comes from a line in section 1.10.32 of this book.

For those interested, the standard Lorem Ipsum text used since the 15th century is provided below, along with the original Latin sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from Cicero’s “De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum”, accompanied by English translations done by H. Rackham in 1914.

What is its purpose?

It is a well-established fact that a reader will be distracted by readable content of a page when looking at its layout. Therefore, using Lorem Ipsum is preferred because it provides a more or less natural distribution of letters, unlike using repeated phrases like “here is text content, here is text content,” which makes the layout look artificial.

Many desktop publishing tools and web page editors use Lorem Ipsum as default placeholder text. If you search for “lorem ipsum” in any search engine, you will find many recent websites using it. Over the years, various versions of Lorem Ipsum have appeared—some by accident, others intentionally, often with humorous alterations.