Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. If this Latin-esque phrase looks familar, it’s because it’s the traditional placeholder or “dummy” text used in typesetting and graphic design for previewing layouts. You might be surprised to learn, though, that it doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s a passage of scrambled Latin text; the intended purpose is to draw the brain away from reading the text itself, and instead call focus to the design of the layout.
The use of classical-language placeholder text in web design is called “greeking,” from the expression, “It’s all Greek to me.” In other words, it’s incomprehensible. Here’s the text of a standard Lorem ipsum passage (when longer text is needed, it just repeats):
A Brief History of “Lorem Ipsum”
Using Latin text as a printing placeholder began long before web design. As early as the 1500s, printers would use sections of classical works to make type-specimen books to demonstrate different fonts. Latin was chosen for this task because it was considered a lingua franca (common tongue) across Europe — far from the dead language it is today.
The exact origination of the scrambled Lorem ipsum text is unknown, but it came into widespread use in the 1960s when the typeface manufacturing company Letraset chose the passage for preprinted transfer sheets for use in the advertising industry. These sheets allowed designers and typesetters to easily transfer the text in various fonts, sizes, and formats for advertisement prototypes.
Fast-forward to the 1980s and the dawn of the personal computer: The Aldus Corporation used Lorem ipsum as part of its word-processing software before Microsoft adopted it for its Word program, and it took off from there. Even today, most online content-management platforms, such as WordPress and Squarespace, use the Lorem ipsum passage for preview text.
But Where Did It Come From, Really?
It would seem that Lorem ipsum stumbled into fame (or at least universal graphic design usage) a bit haphazardly. Where did this mish-mash of Latin copy actually come from? Until the 1990s, it was thought to be a jumble of random words, but there are clues to the mystery. Latin scholar and professor Richard McClintock traced the text to a passage from De finibus bonorum et malorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”), an ethical treatise written by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, circa 45 BCE. McClintock was able to track the Lorem ipsum text by searching Latin texts for the word consectetur, which he ultimately found in the 1914 Loeb Classical Library edition of the Cicero text.
This version reads as follows, but the word dolorem is split between a page break (creating the word lorem), and the rest of the text was scrambled to make the Lorem ipsum dummy text.
The newest iteration of placeholder text is “copy pasta” — blocks of text that appear to have been copied and pasted across social media and online forums. Sometimes these serve the same purpose as Lorem ipsum, giving the brain something to gloss over. In its most benign form, copy pasta is a kind of internet joke form of the game Telephone, but versions of copy pasta have also appeared in misinformation campaigns. The nonsense text is just that — nonsense.
