What is Lorem ipsum?

A quick and simplified answer is that Lorem Ipsum refers to text that the DTP (Desktop Publishing) industry use as replacement text when the real text is not available.

For example, when designing a brochure or book, a designer will insert Lorem ipsum text if the real text is not available. The Lorem ipsum text looks real enough that the brochure or book looks complete. The book or brochure can be shown to the client for approval.

The important factor when using Lorem ipsum text is that the text looks realistic otherwise the brochure or book will not look very good. Lorem Ipsum is dummy text which has no meaning however looks very similar to real text.

Common names for Lorem ipsum text include:

  • blind text
  • dummy text
  • greeked text
  • placeholder text
  • mock content
  • filler text

Where did it come from ?

In design magazine, Before and After Magazine, a journalist wrote in volume 4, number 2 the following:

After telling everyone that Lorem ipsum, the nonsensical text that comes with PageMaker, only looks like Latin but actually says nothing, I heard from Richard McClintock, publication director at the Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who had enlightening news:

Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from Cicero’s ‘De finibus bonorum et malorum’ 1.10.32, which begins ‘Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit…’ [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]

What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since some printed in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occasional ‘ing’ or ‘y’ thrown in. It’s ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase ‘it’s Greek to me’ and ‘greeking’ have common semantic roots!

Rick Pali submitted this article to alt.fonts faqs because it was stated there that no one knew where it came from.