What is Lorem Ipsum?
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of 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 make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Why do we use it?
It’s a well-known fact that a reader looking at the layout of a page will be distracted by the readable content. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more normal distribution of letters (as opposed to using short, repetitive phrases like “content here”), making it look like a standard, readable block of text. Many desktop publishing and web design programs now use Lorem Ipsum as their model text. Various versions of this text have developed over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (for example, by injected humour).
Where does it come from?
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum isn’t simply a random string of characters. It dates back to a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 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 went through the cites of the word in classical literature to discover the undoubtable source. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a passage in section 1.10.32.
The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from Cicero’s “De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” are also reproduced in their original form, accompanied by H. Rackham’s 1914 English translation.
Where can I find it?
There are countless variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but most have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don’t look even slightly believable. If you decide to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn’t anything embarrassing in it. All the Lorem Ipsum generators available online tend to repeat predefined paragraphs, making this the first true automatic 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 which looks believable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is always free of repetition, awkward or inappropriate words, etc.