Lorem Ipsum

Lorem ipsum, placeholder or dummy text used in typesetting and graphic design for previewing layouts. It features scrambled Latin text, which emphasizes the design over content of the layout. It is the standard placeholder text of the printing and publishing industries.

Its name derives from the first words of the standard Lorem ipsum passage:

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 first use of Lorem ipsum is uncertain, though some have suggested the 1500s, when sections of Classical works were often used as dummy texts by printers to make type specimen books demonstrating different fonts. According to this account, the material was chosen based on Latin’s familiarity as a lingua franca across Europe and the popularity of Classical works during the Middle Ages. Whenever it was first created, Lorem ipsum did not gain widespread popularity until the 1960s, when Letraset manufactured preprinted transfer sheets that featured the passage for use in the advertising industry. The sheets allowed typesetters and designers to cut out and rub on the text in various fonts, sizes, and formats for mock-ups and prototypes.

In the 1980s, during the rise of the personal computer, Aldus Corporation developed its PageMaker desktop publishing software, which included Lorem ipsum as a word processing feature. Other word processors, including Microsoft Word, adopted the feature, and it became ubiquitous as a placeholder in Web design. Most Web content management systems, such as Joomla! and Wordpress, also feature a plug-in that generates Lorem ipsum.

The Lorem ipsum text was thought to be random words until the 1990s, when its source was discovered by Richard McClintock, an American professor and Latin scholar. He traced the text to a passage from the 1914 Loeb Classical Library edition of De finibus bonorum et malorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”), a treatise on ethics by Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero from 45 bce. In the original passage, the first sentence used in the dummy text reads:

Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.

McClintock discovered the source by searching in Latin texts for the word consectetur, but he also found that the Loeb edition has a page break beginning with “Lorem.” The passage was likely scrambled further to make a dummy text.

The use of placeholder text in Web design is often called “greeking,” bearing the same meaning as the phrase “It’s Greek to me” to describe something that appears incomprehensible. Hence, Lorem ipsum and other placeholder texts are also known as “Greek copy.”