What Is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is, at heart, placeholder text — the sort printers and typesetters have used for centuries when the words themselves aren't the point. Its history stretches back to around 1500, when an unknown printer took a collection of type, scrambled it and produced what amounted to a specimen book. Five centuries later, remarkably little had changed: Lorem Ipsum survived the leap from metal type to the computer screen.

Then came the 1960s. Letraset sheets — familiar to generations of designers and typesetters — helped push Lorem Ipsum into wider circulation by including passages of the text in their transfer lettering. Later, desktop-publishing software such as Aldus PageMaker brought versions of it into the digital age. Old filler, new medium.

Why Do We Use It?

There’s a practical reason. Faced with meaningful copy, readers tend to read it — which can pull their attention away from the design they're supposed to be assessing.

Lorem Ipsum gets around that problem.

Unlike repetitive placeholders such as “Content here, content here,” its letters and words fall into patterns that look roughly like ordinary prose. From a distance, it reads like real language without demanding to be read for meaning: the layout stays centre stage.

For years, web editors and desktop-publishing packages have therefore used Lorem Ipsum as their default dummy copy. Search for the phrase online and you'll still find it scattered across unfinished websites, templates and pages caught somewhere between construction and publication.

Along the way, the text has mutated. Some variations emerged by accident; others were deliberately altered — jokes slipped in, words rearranged, fragments invented. Yet the basic purpose hasn't changed.

Where Does It Come From?

Random gibberish it isn't.

Behind Lorem Ipsum lies a text more than two millennia old: a work of Latin literature dating to 45 BC. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, traced one of its more obscure words, “consectetur,” through classical sources and found what is widely recognised as Lorem Ipsum's origin.

The trail led to Cicero.

More precisely, passages in sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum — On the Ends of Good and Evil — written by Cicero in 45 BC. A philosophical treatise on ethics, the work became particularly influential during the Renaissance.

From section 1.10.32 came the seed of a phrase that designers would encounter centuries later, stripped of its original argument and transformed into something Cicero could hardly have anticipated: filler text.

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…”

Ancient philosophy, repurposed for the blank page.

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