Lorem Ipsum is simply a fictitious text from the printing industry. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap to electronic composition, remaining essentially unchanged.
It was popularized in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing passages from Lorem Ipsum and, more recently, with desktop publishing software such as Aldus PageMaker, including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
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 template text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humor and the like).
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply a random text. It has its roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, which is over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, professor of Latin at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, researched one of the most obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a passage in Lorem Ipsum, and going through the quotations of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubted source.
Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero’s “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil), written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, which 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 piece of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero’s “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions of the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.
There are many variations of Lorem Ipsum passages available, but most have been altered in some way, by injected humor, or random words that don’t seem believable at all. If you’re going to use a Lorem Ipsum passage, you need to make sure there’s nothing embarrassing hidden in the middle of the text.
All Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined bits 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 sounds reasonable. The Lorem Ipsum generated is therefore always free of repetition, injected humor or uncharacteristic words, etc.
