What is Lorem Ipsum?
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text used in the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to create a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the transition to electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularized in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software such as Aldus PageMaker, which included versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Why do we use it?
It is a long-established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using “Content here, content here,” making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default sample text, and a search for “lorem ipsum” will reveal many websites still in their early stages of development. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (such as the inclusion of humor and the like).
Where does it come from?
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has its roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2,000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, “consectetur,” from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and by examining the citations of the word in classical literature, discovered its undoubted source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of *De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum* (On the Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics that was very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…,” comes from a line in section 1.10.32.
The standard passage of Lorem Ipsum, which has been in use since the 1500s, is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.
Where can I get some?
There are many variations of Lorem Ipsum passages available, but most have been altered in some way—either by the addition of humor or by randomizing words that don’t look even remotely believable. If you’re going to use a Lorem Ipsum passage, you need to be sure there isn’t anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of the text. All Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as needed, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum that looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, inserted humor, or out-of-place words, etc.