Lorem ipsum

Imagine needing to design a beautiful brochure or website, but the actual words aren't ready yet. What do you put in those empty spaces to see how everything looks? This is where "Lorem ipsum" steps in—a peculiar, ancient-sounding Latin text that has become the ubiquitous placeholder for designers worldwide. Its mysterious origins and nonsensical nature make it the perfect visual stand-in, allowing creativity to flow without the distraction of meaningful content. Lorem ipsum is a common placeholder text used to visualize page layouts without distracting from the design. It originated from a corrupted passage of a 1st-century BC philosophical text by the Roman statesman Cicero. The text was popularized in modern typesetting in the 1960s and later became a staple in digital design software.

Source: Wikipedia

AI Summary

Lorem ipsum is a common placeholder text used to visualize page layouts without distracting from the design.
It originated from a corrupted passage of a 1st-century BC philosophical text by the Roman statesman Cicero.
The text was popularized in modern typesetting in the 1960s and later became a staple in digital design software.

What is Lorem Ipsum?

At its heart, Lorem ipsum is simply dummy text—a series of words and phrases that look like real Latin but carry no actual meaning. Its primary role is to serve as a placeholder in graphic design, publishing, and web development, allowing designers to focus purely on visual elements like layout, typography, and spacing without being sidetracked by the content itself.

Think of it as a stand-in, a temporary filler that lets you see how your design will look before the actual copy is written. This ensures that a page's aesthetic and functional structure can be perfected independently, preventing meaningful text from inadvertently influencing design choices.

An Unexpected Ancient Pedigree

Despite its nonsensical nature, Lorem ipsum isn't a random collection of words. It's actually a heavily altered, fragmented version of a text from the 1st century BC by the Roman statesman and philosopher, Cicero. Yes, that Cicero—the orator, lawyer, and consul of ancient Rome!

The original work is titled "De finibus bonorum et malorum," which translates to "On the Ends of Goods and Evils." It's a philosophical treatise exploring different theories of ethics. The phrase "Lorem ipsum" itself is a truncation of "dolorem ipsum," meaning "pain itself" or "the pain itself."

From Ancient Scrolls to Modern Screens

While its roots are ancient, Lorem ipsum's journey to ubiquity is much more recent. Its use in modern typesetting took off in the 1960s, thanks to advertisements for Letraset transfer sheets. These sheets allowed designers to apply text by rubbing it onto a surface, and Lorem ipsum provided a perfect, meaningless example.

The digital age embraced Lorem ipsum in the mid-1980s. Aldus Corporation incorporated it into templates for its groundbreaking desktop publishing program, PageMaker. From there, it quickly spread, becoming a standard feature in everything from Microsoft Word and Apple Pages to web content management systems like WordPress and Joomla!, and even CSS libraries.

The Familiar Passage

The most commonly seen Lorem ipsum passage often begins like this, a string of Latin-like words that perfectly fill out a paragraph, convincing enough to look like real text without actually communicating anything.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

The Detective Story of Its Origin

For a long time, the exact source of Lorem ipsum was a mystery. Many believed it to be truly random or a completely fabricated text. However, the puzzle was eventually solved by Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden–Sydney College.

Sometime before 1982, while searching for instances of the obscure Latin word "consectetur" in classical literature, McClintock stumbled upon the connection. He identified the Lorem ipsum text as fragments from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero's "De finibus bonorum et malorum."

The prevailing theory is that the Lorem ipsum passage likely originated from a mixed-up galley proof of the 1914 Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero's work. A typesetter, needing filler text, might have unintentionally combined and corrupted parts of the original Latin, giving birth to the iconic placeholder text we know today.

This fascinating discovery, initially published in a 1994 letter to a design magazine, finally gave meaning and a concrete origin to the seemingly meaningless Lorem ipsum, cementing its place as an intriguing piece of both design history and classical scholarship.

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Lorem ipsum

Using Lorem ipsum to focus attention on graphic elements in a webpage design proposal

An example of the Lorem ipsum placeholder text on a Letraset sample sheet. Date unknown, possibly 1970s.

Lorem ipsum ( LOR-əm IP-səm) is a dummy or placeholder text commonly used in graphic design, publishing, and web development. It is typically a corrupted version of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC text by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical and improper Latin. The first two words are the truncation of dolorem ipsum ("pain itself"). Lorem ipsum's purpose is to permit a page layout to be designed, independently of the copy that will subsequently populate it, or to demonstrate various fonts of a typeface without meaningful text that could be distracting.

Versions of the Lorem ipsum text have been used in typesetting since the 1960s, when advertisements for Letraset transfer sheets popularized it. Lorem ipsum was introduced to the digital world in the mid-1980s, when Aldus employed it in graphic and word-processing templates for its desktop publishing program PageMaker. Other popular word processors, including Pages and Microsoft Word, have since adopted Lorem ipsum, as have many LaTeX packages, web content managers such as Joomla! and WordPress, and CSS libraries such as Semantic UI.

Example text

Lorem ipsum

Source text

Lorem ipsum

The Lorem ipsum text is derived from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum. The physical source may have been the 1914 Loeb Classical Library edition of De finibus, where the Latin text, presented on the left-hand (even) pages, breaks off on page 34 with "Neque porro quisquam est qui do-" and continues on page 36 with "lorem ipsum ...," suggesting that the galley type of that page was mixed up to make the dummy text seen today.

The discovery of the text's origin is attributed to Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden–Sydney College. McClintock connected Lorem ipsum to Cicero's writing sometime before 1982 while searching for instances of the Latin word consectetur, which was rarely used in classical literature. McClintock first published his discovery in a 1994 letter to a Before & After magazine editor, contesting the editor's earlier claim that Lorem ipsum had no meaning.

The relevant section of Cicero as printed in the source is reproduced below with fragments used in Lorem ipsum underlined. Letters in brackets were added to Lorem ipsum and were not present in the source text:

Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa, quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt, explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet consectetur adipisci[ng] velit, sed quia non numquam [do] eius modi tempora inci[di]dunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum[d] exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? [D]Quis autem vel eum i[r]ure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur? At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus, qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti, quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint, obcaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa, qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem reru[d]um facilis est e[r]t expedita distinctio. Nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio, cumque nihil impedit, quo minus id, quod maxime placeat facere possimus, omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis dolor repellend[a]us. Temporibus autem quibusdam et aut officiis debitis aut rerum necessitatibus saepe eveniet, ut et voluptates repudiandae sint et molestiae non recusandae. Itaque earum rerum hic tenetur a sapiente delectus, ut aut reiciendis voluptatibus maiores alias consequatur aut perferendis doloribus asperiores repellat.

What follows is H. Rackham's translation, as printed in the 1914 Loeb edition, with words at least partially represented in Lorem ipsum underlined:

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of reprobating pleasure and extolling pain arose. To do so, I will give you a complete account of the system and expound the teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter extremely painful consequences. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure? On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and nothing prevents us from being what we like best, every pleasure is welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures must be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man, therefore, always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.