What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is placeholder text used in the printing and typesetting industry. It has served as the standard dummy text since the 1500s, when an unidentified printer scrambled a collection of type to create a type specimen book. Remarkably, it has stood the test of time, persisting through five centuries and now transitioning into the electronic typesetting realm, largely unchanged. Its popularity surged in the 1960s with the introduction of Letraset sheets featuring Lorem Ipsum excerpts and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker, which includes versions of the text.

Why is it used?

It is a widely accepted fact that readers can be distracted by readable content when examining a page’s layout. The advantage of using Lorem Ipsum is that it offers a relatively standard distribution of letters, which is preferable to the repetitive ‘Content here, content here’ as it resembles coherent English. Many desktop publishing programs and web page editors now default to Lorem Ipsum as their model text. A search for ‘lorem ipsum’ reveals numerous websites still under development. Over the years, various iterations have emerged, sometimes accidentally, and at times intentionally with humor and creativity injected into the text.

Where does it originate?

Contrary to what some might believe, Lorem Ipsum is not mere gibberish. Its origins trace back to a significant Latin literature piece from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, identified a less common Latin term, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage. By exploring its occurrences in classical literature, he pinpointed its source. Lorem Ipsum is derived 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 work is an ethical treatise that gained popularity during the Renaissance. The opening line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, is sourced directly from section 1.10.32.

For those interested, the standard Lorem Ipsum excerpt used since the 1500s is presented below, alongside the original text from “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero, accompanied by the English translation from 1914 by H. Rackham.

How can I obtain some?

Numerous variations of Lorem Ipsum passages exist, but most have undergone some modification, whether through humorous additions or random alterations that often appear implausible. If you plan to utilize a Lorem Ipsum passage, ensure there are no unintended or inappropriate words embedded within the text. The various Lorem Ipsum generators available online tend to repeat predefined sections, but the first true generator on the Internet relies on a vocabulary of over 200 Latin words combined with several sentence structures to produce reasonable-looking Lorem Ipsum. As a result, the generated text is typically devoid of repetition, humor, or non-characteristic words.

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