The Surprising History of Lorem Ipsum

If you've ever worked with a designer or used a website template, you've seen it: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...". This seemingly random, Latin-like text is the default placeholder for the entire design industry.

But it's not gibberish. It has a long and fascinating history that dates back nearly 2,000 years to ancient Rome.

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is a "dummy" or "placeholder" text used to fill space in a design before the final content is ready. Its purpose is to show how a layout will look with text in it without distracting the viewer with readable content. The words have a normal letter distribution and spacing, making it a realistic substitute for real text.

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The Ancient Roman Connection

The text we know as Lorem Ipsum is actually derived from a real piece of classical Latin literature: "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (On the Extremes of Good and Evil), written in 45 BC by the famous Roman orator and philosopher, Cicero.

The standard Lorem Ipsum passage comes from a section that reads:

"...neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."

This translates to:

"...nor is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain..."

How Did Cicero's Work Become Gibberish?

The jump from classical philosophy to modern design placeholder is believed to have happened in the 16th century. A printer is thought to have scrambled a galley of type to create a type specimen book—a book designed to showcase different fonts.

By taking a passage of real Latin and scrambling it, the printer created a block of text that looked like Latin and had a natural flow but was intentionally nonsensical. This was perfect for its purpose: it allowed people to focus on the visual appearance of the font and layout without being distracted by reading the content.

The Digital Age Revival

For centuries, Lorem Ipsum was used in the print industry. Its modern revival came in the 1980s with the advent of desktop publishing software. Aldus PageMaker, one of the first design programs, included Lorem Ipsum as a built-in placeholder text feature.

From there, it spread to virtually every design application, website template, and theme on the planet, solidifying its status as the undisputed king of dummy text.

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So, the next time you see "Lorem ipsum," you'll know you're not just looking at random words. You're looking at a piece of scrambled classical philosophy that has been serving designers and printers for over 500 years. It's a small but fascinating piece of design history that connects the ancient world to our modern digital age.