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.

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 model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in 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 going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. 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 line in section 1.10.32.

The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, beatae sed in vitae, rhoncus suspendisse erat ac ligula maecenas, pede aenean. Proident blandit nulla eu, cum mattis lacinia, purus metus ultricies tellus egestas, sapien ac cras, quam ac fusce in. Elementum in neque ut et pellentesque viverra, vestibulum mi ut pede augue eu laoreet. Massa imperdiet potenti aliquam, erat lacus et at sed rhoncus, cursus ornare in sit wisi, sociosqu volutpat magna ac sed ut, enim vulputate volutpat duis id at. Ultricies sit vestibulum, ut et erat ligula, vestibulum diam nec blandit consectetur sed, suspendisse rutrum eu turpis, luctus adipiscing excepteur elit pellentesque ipsum. Nibh pellentesque ipsum ultricies sem dapibus, nascetur bibendum sed sem proin, erat pellentesque suspendisse ante.

Ultricies ut aliqua felis, nisl nec dolor dolor, magna et enim wisi hymenaeos scelerisque sodales. Quis ultricies ullamcorper, sit gravida mi ut dolor magnis ullamcorper, sapien aliquam nec nisl, non maecenas tristique eu. Et lacus, aliquam euismod eu non maecenas nisl risus. Tempor adipiscing eros enim in quis eu, duis eleifend eleifend in in maecenas senectus, orci facilisis morbi suspendisse, vestibulum lobortis et venenatis at posuere tortor, in vel ante. Est ultricies aliquam mattis, massa id, aliquam lectus non magna justo justo vestibulum. Malesuada sem consequat, tortor consectetuer ipsum. Justo ultricies elit vel, quis sed dolor, eu at dolor ac in eu, ultrices ornare aenean vel aenean, massa sollicitudin ligula erat hac suspendisse nam. Pulvinar rutrum, ornare donec turpis venenatis, et erat porta sed ante adipiscing, quisque dui. Id at aenean sapien nec sem, vitae purus turpis mollis risus, orci vel eget dolorum.

Mauris neque aptent molestie sollicitudin euismod inventore, nulla ante leo donec sit aliquam hic. Sed erat, semper nec eleifend, nec et, turpis sit ad in. Ligula maecenas amet, id ridiculus cras fermentum eu donec ac, massa amet ipsum ante, ut arcu odio. Quam maecenas at donec, nulla lectus ut mus vestibulum at volutpat, sit mauris pulvinar bibendum ante. Nec ut morbi, eu cras. Dignissim in vestibulum dictumst nisl vitae. Dolor donec, odio neque mauris faucibus et lorem, dolor massa mauris morbi quam, mattis lectus massa. Elit convallis habitasse purus lacus lacus suspendisse.

Repudiandae dignissimos, id sed, venenatis orci ipsum neque ante, ac in diam sociis, lectus nullam aliquam. Non massa, sollicitudin ex magna suscipit. Rhoncus erat, ultrices elit, vivamus sollicitudin arcu nunc, quisque lacus nonummy congue arcu. Sit urna non curae varius, ultrices cras etiam lacus augue vel sed, sem semper mattis, aliquam sem morbi fames. Eu dignissim, mattis massa nullam turpis dictum, sollicitudin nibh, consequat donec, fringilla accumsan mi suscipit vitae molestie. Sed curabitur gravida, etiam scelerisque. Porttitor massa lacus id nonummy ut, mi arcu libero ipsum sapien, nisl eleifend elit adipiscing id. Bibendum a, etiam sem lacinia a, urna phasellus quis faucibus velit nibh gravida, interdum orci eu a fusce dapibus phasellus, a nisl.

That's a lot more than I ever knew about Lorem Ipsum, even though we owned and operated a graphics arts/typesetting business for ten years. I knew there was a standard set of text used for dummy, but knew nothing more than that. We had the first digital typesetter between LA and San Francisco, and a technician for Mergenthaler-Linotype gave me a disk with Lorem. I don't believe I ever had a use for it.

Your mention of Letraset brought back memories. Most of our customers were printers or graphic designers and often specified a headline type which we did not have for the machine. We had hundreds of sheets of partially used Letraset type when we closed up.

This came up because my author friend Nick had a bunch of Lorem Ipsum text on his website, which he did not know was a placeholder. He thought it was some kind of actual Latin. I'd read about it years ago, don't remember why.

There's a concurrent set of spoken texts, used in telecommunications, to test the intelligibility of speech. It's a fascinating set of near-nonsense paragraphs. However, I cannot think of the name of these texts, nor remember any text within them, so have been unable to add them to this Lorem Ipsum mention.