Lorem ipsum

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Using lorem ipsum to focus attention on graphic elements in a webpage design proposal

In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum (derived from Latin dolorem ipsum, translated as "pain itself") is a filler text commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation. Replacing meaningful content with placeholder text allows viewers to focus on graphic aspects such as font, typography, and page layout without being distracted by the content. It also reduces the need for the designer to come up with meaningful text, as they can instead use quickly-generated lorem ipsum.

The lorem ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, improper Latin.

A variation of the ordinary lorem ipsum text has been used in typesetting since the 1960s or earlier, when it was popularized by advertisements for Letraset transfer sheets. It was introduced to the Information Age in the mid-1980s by Aldus Corporation, which employed it in graphics and word processing templates for its desktop publishing program, PageMaker, for the Apple Macintosh.

Example text

A common form of lorem ipsum reads:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Discovery

"Lorem ipsum" text is derived from sections 1.10.32–3 of Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the Ends of Goods and Evils, or alternatively [About] The Purposes of Good and Evil). The original passage began: Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet consectetur adipisci velit (translation: "Neither is there anyone who loves, pursues or desires pain itself because it is pain").

It is not known exactly when the text acquired its current standard form; it may have been as late as the 1960s. Dr. Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar who was the publications director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, discovered the source of the passage sometime before 1982 while searching for instances of the Latin word "consectetur", rarely used in classical literature. The physical source of the Lorem Ipsum text may be the 1914 Loeb Classical Library Edition of the De Finibus, where the Latin text finishes page 34 with "Neque porro quisquam est qui do-" and begins page 36 with "lorem ipsum (et seq.)…", suggesting that the galley type of that page 36 was scrambled to make the dummy text seen today.

English translation

This is H. Rackham's 1914 translation – in the aforementioned Loeb Classical Library edition – with the major source of lorem ipsum highlighted:

[32] But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing of a pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure? [33] On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.

Variations

A lorem ipsum placeholder text was inadvertently published in The Straits Times, a Singapore newspaper, on 26 April 2014.

Today's popular version of Lorem ipsum was first created in the mid-1980s for Aldus Corporation's desktop publishing program PageMaker for the Apple Macintosh. Aldus adapted older forms of the lorem text from typography samples to use in PageMaker's graphics and word processing templates.

Nowadays a variety of software, including text editors and plug-ins, can generate semi-random "lorem-like text", which often has little or nothing in common with the canonical adaptations other than looking like (and often being) jumbled Latin. Apple's Pages and Keynote software employ such jumbled text as sample screenplay layout. Lorem ipsum is also featured on Joomla! and WordPress web content managers. Microsoft Office Word 2007, 2010 and 2013 have a Lorem ipsum feature. In some early versions, Adobe Dreamweaver had offered a "Lorem and More" extension for inserting "lorem text" into web pages. Cicero's first Oration against Catiline — Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet?… — is sometimes used in type specimens.

See also

• Asemic writing
• etaoin shrdlu
• Filler text
• Greeking
• Lenna
• Li Europan lingues
• List of Latin phrases
• Metasyntactic variable
• The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

External links

• The original De finibus bonorum et malorum (Book 1) from Cicero, on Latin WikiSource.