Greeking is a style of displaying or rendering text or symbols, not always from the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as ...

. Greeking obscures portions of a work for the purpose of either emphasizing form over details or displaying placeholders for unavailable content. The name is a reference to the phrase " Greek to me", meaning something that one cannot understand, so that it might as well be in a foreign language.

In typography

Greeked text is used in

typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), an ...

to evaluate a certain

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

's appropriateness, overall style or

type color Type color, or colour, is an element of typography that describes how dense or heavy the text appears on the page. Finding the correct balance of type color and white space can make text more easily readable. The term ''type color'' should not ...

. Because a viewer can be distracted by meaningful content, greeking unimportant text forces the viewer to focus on layout and design. Greeking is also used when a design is being developed but the content is unfinished. One example might be the layout of a magazine article which has photographs but no text; initially, a

lorem ipsum In publishing and graphic design, ''Lorem ipsum'' is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. ''Lorem ipsum'' may be used as a placeholder before final ...

text is used, and then the nonsense text is replaced with draft versions as they become available. This allows design and layout to be carried out in parallel with content revisions.

In computing

Greeking can refer to the automatic rendering of text characters as unreadable symbols or lines in the layout preview function of

word processing A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no conse ...

documents, either to speed up screen display"Greeking"
/ref> or because the graphics display capabilities of the monitor are insufficient for rendering extremely small texts.
from ''Webopedia'' The term "greeking" was applied by various

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

editors of the 1980s, such as ApplixWare and Island Graphics. Greeking referred to the substitution of text with a placeholder gray bar upon moving out of focus.

In visual media

As in typography, greeking involves inserting nonsense text or, commonly,

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

text in

prototypes A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and software programming. A prototype is generally used to ...

of visual media projects (such as in graphic and

web design Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code a ...

) to check the layout of the final version before the actual text is available, or to enhance layout assessment by eliminating the distraction of readable text. Text of this sort is known as "greeked text", "dummy text", or "

jabberwocky "Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock". It was included in his 1871 novel ''Through the Looking-Glass'', the sequel to '' Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865). The ...

text". ''

Lorem ipsum In publishing and graphic design, ''Lorem ipsum'' is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. ''Lorem ipsum'' may be used as a placeholder before final ...

'' is a commonly used example, though this is derived from Latin, not Greek.

In the arts

Greeking in theatre, television, and film production art-department work refers to the process of changing or hiding corporate

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from ot ...

s that have not been "cleared" legally for use in the production.

References

{{Typography terms Typography Filler text