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.

Why do we use it?

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).

Where does it come from?

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.