Ah yes, the age old question. Lorem Ipsum is used by all of our designers who need filler text. 

Yeah yeah we get that but WHAT is it?

What is Lorem Ipsum?

In layman's terms, Lorem Ipsum is a dummy or placeholder text. It's often used in laying out print, infographics, or web design. The primary purpose of Lorem Ipsum is to create text that does not distract from the overall layout and visual hierarchy.

Although the text is in Latin, it does not have any intelligible meaning. It's merely a generic text used to hold a place in a file until the actual text or visuals are created to replace it.

A brief history of Lorem Ipsum

The term Lorem Ipsum is derived from the Latin term Dolorem Ipsum which means "pain itself. " The text has been in use for a very long time and its history spans for over two millennia. 

Ancient roots

Its origins were discovered by Richard McClintock, a Latin Scholar from Hampden-Sydney College. According to his research, Lorem Ipsum dates back to 45 BC, from Classical Latin literature.

The words in the text originated from the book De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The ends of Good and Evil). The series of books was a treatise on the theory of ethics and was written by the ancient Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero.

The placeholder text was taken from the first book's discourse on hedonism. Its original text is a lot more cohesive than the modern version. The treatise was very popular during the Renaissance period, and it compelled a great many intellectuals and luminaries of the time to read the books.

The Renaissance Era

It was due to the popularity of De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum that the Lorem Ipsum text came to be in its current form. Cicero was considered one of the most skilled rhetoricians of all time. During the age of enlightenment, his works were considered the standard for prose in Latin.

A case of strange coincidence

But how did the great works of Cicero ultimately become a filler text?

According to McClintock, it may have just been a happy coincidence. He theorized that a typesetter, who was required to make a type specimen book, used the text as a way to demonstrate different fonts. And seeing as the text should be insensible so as not to distract from the graphical features, the typesetter scrambled the words.

With Cicero's work as one of the most published works during that time, the typesetter would most likely have used an excerpt from Cicero's books. Due to this strange coincidence, the garbled words of a legendary rhetorician has survived for over four centuries.

We use loremipsum.io to generate the basis of our content. We do have a copywriter that we hire from time to time, but as that expense can get expensive for the end-user (Infinite 8 Customers) we try and encourage you to provide the content to replace our dummy text.

*Historical from Blog at g2.com