Lorem ipsum
Lorem ipsum (/ˌlɔː.rəm ˈɪp.səm/ LOR-əm IP-səm) is a dummy or placeholder text commonly used in graphic design, publishing, and web development. Its purpose is to permit a page layout to be designed, independently of the copy that will subsequently populate it, or to demonstrate various fonts of a typeface without meaningful text that could be distracting.
Lorem ipsum is typically a corrupted version of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC text by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical and improper Latin. The first two words are the truncation of dolorem ipsum ("pain itself").
Versions of the Lorem ipsum text have been used in typesetting since the 1960s, when advertisements for Letraset transfer sheets popularized it. 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. Other popular word processors, including Pages and Microsoft Word, have since adopted Lorem ipsum, as have many LaTeX packages, web content managers such as Joomla! and WordPress, and CSS 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 Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum. The physical source may have been the 1914 Loeb Classical Library edition of De finibus, where the Latin text, presented on the left-hand (even) pages, breaks off on page 34 with "Neque porro quisquam est qui do-" and continues on page 36 with "lorem ipsum ...," 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. McClintock connected Lorem ipsum to Cicero's writing sometime before 1982 while searching for instances of the Latin word consectetur, which was rarely used in classical literature. McClintock first published his discovery in a 1994 letter to the Before & After magazine editor, contesting the editor's earlier claim that Lorem ipsum had 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 1914 Loeb edition, with words at least partially represented in Lorem ipsum highlighted:
See also
- Asemic writing – Wordless open semantic form of writing
- Etaoin shrdlu – Common metal-type printing error
- Gibberish – Nonsensical speech or writing
- Hamburgevons – Text used as a sample for assessing fonts
- Indian-head test pattern – Television test card
- Lenna – Unauthorized standard test image
- Li Europan lingues – Placeholder text in Interlingue
- Metasyntactic variable – Placeholder term used in computer science
- Pangram – Sentence using every letter of alphabet
- The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog – Sentence containing all letters of the English alphabet
- Shibboleth – Custom or tradition that distinguishes one group from another
- "To come" – Phrase used in publishing to indicate missing material
- Utah teapot – Computer graphics 3D reference and test model
References
External links
- The original De finibus bonorum et malorum (Book 1) from Cicero, on Latin Wikisource