Lorem ipsum and the heritage of this placeholder text
10th January 2022
If you use a writing or web content management system (CMS), you would have come across Lorem Ipsum – the most common placeholder text in the world.
I’m pretty sure that many of us don’t know what this text means or how it started being used as a placeholder, so let’s have a look at the Lorem Ipsum origins and history.
What is Lorem Ipsum?
Lorem Ipsum is standard dummy text, or placeholder text which is used to illustrate what text would look like on a website or in a book, magazine, posted, etc.
Here is an example of Lorem Ipsum text in an article:
Where does Lorem Ipsum come from?
The ‘Lorem Ipsum’ origins were discovered by Richard McClintock, a Latin Scholar from Hampden-Sydney College. According to Richard McClintock, Lorem Ipsum originated in 1500s and has been around for five centuries.
The term ‘Lorem Ipsum’ is derived from the Latin term Dolorem Ipsum which means “pain itself”
Contrary to belief, Loren Ipsum is not just random text. This 2000 year old script comes from passages of a Latin book written in 45 BC by Cicero called “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” which translates to “The Ends of Good and Evil”.
The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in section 1.10.32.
‘The Ends of Good and Evil’ was split into five books. The Lorem Ipsum text passage we know today is derived from parts of Cicero’s first book, Liber Primus, and its discussion on hedonism.
In the 1960s Lorem Ipsum was made popular by typeface manufacturer Letraset, who used it in their advertising campaigns. Letraset used pages of Lorem Ipsum as rub down transfer sheets, which were widely used in the pre-computer era for layouts. These transfer pages, known as Letraset Body Type, were also featured in the company’s advertising.
Lorem Ipsum was introduced to the digital world in the 1980s by Aldus, a company that developed Desktop Publishing Software. Their most well-known product, PageMaker, came with pre-installed graphics and word-processing templates containing a version of the Latin language.
Why do we use Lorem Ipsum?
It is a well-known fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout and visuals. Lorem Ipsum has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English, but less distractive.
Nowadays Lorem Ipsum is used:
- as a content filler before the final copy is available
- to temporarily replace text in a process called greeking, which allows designers to consider the form of a webpage or publication, without the meaning of the text influencing the design
- in content management platforms (CMSs)
- in content publishing platforms
- in design platforms such as in Photoshop
