publishing Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...

and

graphic design Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdiscip ...

, ''Lorem ipsum'' is a

placeholder text Filler text (also placeholder text or dummy text) is text that shares some characteristics of a real written text, but is random or otherwise generated. It may be used to display a sample of fonts, generate text for testing, or to spoof an e ...

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 copy is available. It is also used to temporarily replace text in a process called greeking, which allows designers to consider the form of a webpage or publication, without the meaning of the text influencing the design. ''Lorem ipsum'' is typically a corrupted version of , a 1st-century BC text by the

Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy * Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lett ...

statesman and philosopher

Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the esta ...

, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical and improper

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 ...

. Versions of the ''Lorem ipsum'' text have been used in

typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random ...

at least since the 1960s, when it was popularized by advertisements for

Letraset Letraset was a company known mainly for manufacturing sheets of typefaces and other artwork elements using the dry transfer method. Letraset has been acquired by the Colart group and become part of its subsidiary Winsor & Newton. Corporate his ...

transfer sheets. ''Lorem ipsum'' was introduced to the digital world in the mid-1980s, when Aldus employed it in graphic and word-processing templates for its desktop publishing program

PageMaker Adobe PageMaker (formerly Aldus) is a discontinued desktop publishing computer program introduced in 1985 by the Aldus Corporation on the Apple Macintosh. The combination of the Macintosh's graphical user interface, PageMaker publishing software, ...

. Other popular word processors, including

Pages Page most commonly refers to: * Page (paper), one side of a leaf of paper, as in a book Page, PAGE, pages, or paging may also refer to: Roles * Page (assistance occupation), a professional occupation * Page (servant), traditionally a young mal ...

and

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor, word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other pla ...

, have since adopted ''Lorem ipsum'', as have many

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

packages, web content managers such as

Joomla! Joomla (), also spelled Joomla! (with an exclamation mark) and sometimes abbreviated as J!, is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content on websites. Web content applications include discussion forums, ...

and

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architectu ...

, and

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone technolo ...

libraries such as Semantic UI.

Example text

A common form of ''Lorem ipsum'' reads:

Source text

The ''Lorem ipsum'' text is derived from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of

's . The physical source may have been the 1914

Loeb Classical Library The Loeb Classical Library (LCL; named after James Loeb; , ) is a series of books originally published by Heinemann in London, but is currently published by Harvard University Press. The library contains important works of ancient Greek and ...

edition of , where the Latin text, presented on the left-hand (even) pages, breaks off on page 34 with "" and continues on page 36 with "", suggesting that the galley type of that page was mixed up to make the dummy text seen today. The discovery of the text's origin is attributed to Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at

Hampden–Sydney College gr, Ye Shall Know the Truth , established = , type = Private liberal arts men's college , religious_affiliation = Presbyterian Church (USA) , endowment = $258 million (2021) , president = Larry Stimpert , city = Hampden Sydney, Virginia , co ...

. McClintock connected ''Lorem ipsum'' to Cicero's writing sometime before 1982 while searching for instances of the Latin word , which was rarely used in classical literature. McClintock first published his discovery in a 1994 letter to the editor of ''Before & After'' magazine, contesting the editor's earlier claim that ''Lorem ipsum'' held no meaning. The relevant section of Cicero as printed in the source is reproduced below with fragments used in ''Lorem ipsum'' highlighted. Letters in brackets were added to ''Lorem ipsum'' and were not present in the source text: What follows is H. Rackham's translation, as printed in the

edition, with words at least partially represented in ''Lorem ipsum'' highlighted:

References

External links

* The original '' De finibus bonorum et malorum'' (Book 1) from Cicero, on Latin WikiSource {{Typography terms Filler text Latin words and phrases Nonsense Cicero

Example text

Source text

See also

References

External links