What is Lorem Ipsum?
Dummy text used in the printing and typesetting industries, Lorem Ipsum is exactly that: dummy text. A printer scrambled a galley of type in the 1500s to make a type specimen book, and Lorem Ipsum has been the industry standard ever since. It has remained essentially unchanged over the course of five centuries and the transition to electronic typesetting. Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages were released in the 1960s, and more recently desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker included Lorem Ipsum versions.
Why do we use it?
Readers are distracted by the readability of a page’s layout, a fact that has been established for a long time. As opposed to simply saying “Content here, content here,” Lorem Ipsum has a distribution of letters that makes it look like readable English. Lorem Ipsum is now the default model text for many desktop publishing and web page editors, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will yield many web sites that are still in their infancy. Sometimes by accident and other times on purpose, there have been many different versions over the years (injected humour and the like).
Where does it come from?
Lorem Ipsum, contrary to popular belief, is not just random text. More than two millennia have passed since its earliest mention in a piece of classical Latin literature written in 45 BC. Prof. Richard McClintock of Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia looked up the Latin word consectetur from a Lorem Ipsum passage and found the undeniable source by looking through the cites of the word in classical literature. “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The End of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC, contains the words “Lorem Ipsum.” In the Renaissance, this book was widely read as a treatise on ethics. ‘Lorem ipsum dolour sit amet..’ comes from a line in section 1.10.32 of the text.
For those who are curious, the Lorem Ipsum chunk used since the 1500s is shown below. Both Cicero’s “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33, along with English translations from the 1914 translation of H. Rackham, are included.
Where can I get some?
Lorem Ipsum’s passages have been altered in a variety of ways, but the majority have been injected with humour or have randomised words that don’t look even remotely credible. In order to use Lorem Ipsum, you must ensure that there are no embarrassing passages hidden in the text. This is the first true Lorem Ipsum generator on the Internet, as all other generators tend to repeat predefined chunks. Lorem Ipsum is generated using a dictionary of over 200 Latin words and a few model sentence structures. Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free of repetition, humour or non-characteristic words.