What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dum­my text of the prin­ting and type­set­ting indu­stry. Lorem Ipsum has been the indu­stry’s stan­dard dum­my text ever sin­ce the 1500s, when an unk­nown prin­ter took a gal­ley of type and scram­bled it to make a type spe­ci­men book. It has sur­vi­ved not only five cen­tu­ri­es, but also the leap into electro­nic type­set­ting, remai­ning essen­ti­al­ly unchang­ed. It was popu­la­ri­sed in the 1960s with the rele­a­se of Letraset she­ets con­tai­ning Lorem Ipsum pas­sa­ges, and more recent­ly with desk­top publishing soft­wa­re like Aldus PageMaker inclu­ding ver­sions of Lorem Ipsum.

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a rea­der will be dis­trac­ted by the rea­dab­le con­tent of a page when loo­king at its lay­out. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less nor­mal dis­tri­bu­tion of let­ters, as oppo­sed to using ’Content here, con­tent here’, making it look like rea­dab­le English. Many desk­top publishing pac­ka­ges and web page edi­tors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ’lorem ipsum’ will unco­ver many web sites still in their infan­cy. Various ver­sions have evol­ved over the years, some­ti­mes by acci­dent, some­ti­mes on pur­po­se (injec­ted humour and the like).

Where does it come from?

Contrary to popu­lar beli­ef, Lorem Ipsum is not simply ran­dom text. It has roots in a pie­ce of clas­si­cal Latin lite­ra­tu­re from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin pro­fes­sor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscu­re Latin words, con­sec­te­tur, from a Lorem Ipsum pas­sage, and going through the cites of the word in clas­si­cal lite­ra­tu­re, disco­ve­red the undoub­tab­le sour­ce. Lorem Ipsum comes from sec­tions 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of ”de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, writ­ten in 45 BC. This book is a tre­a­ti­se on the the­o­ry of ethics, 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.

The stan­dard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used sin­ce the 1500s is repro­du­ced below for tho­se inte­res­ted. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from ”de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero are also repro­du­ced in their exact ori­gi­nal form, accom­pa­ni­ed by English ver­sions from the 1914 trans­la­tion by H. Rackham.

Where can I get some?

There are many vari­a­tions of pas­sa­ges of Lorem Ipsum avai­lab­le, but the majo­ri­ty have suf­fe­red alte­ra­tion in some form, by injec­ted humour, or ran­do­mi­sed words which don’t look even slight­ly beli­e­vab­le. If you are going to use a pas­sage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure the­re isn’t anyt­hing embar­ras­sing hid­den in the midd­le of text. All the Lorem Ipsum gene­ra­tors on the Internet tend to repe­at pre­de­fi­ned chunks as neces­sa­ry, making this the first true gene­ra­tor on the Internet. It uses a dic­tio­na­ry of over 200 Latin words, com­bi­ned with a hand­ful of model sen­tence structu­res, to gene­ra­te Lorem Ipsum which looks rea­so­nab­le. The gene­ra­ted Lorem Ipsum is the­re­fo­re always free from repe­ti­tion, injec­ted humour, or non-characteristic words etc.