Chances are that you’ve seen “lorem ipsum” text in your travels across the web. It often appears in graphic design materials such as WordPress themes and publishing mockups. This text looks like nonsense, so why is it so common? Let’s take a look at what lorem ipsum copy is used for, what lorem ipsum means in English, and how you can easily generate this text yourself.

What Is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem ipsum is a name for a common type of placeholder text. Also known as filler or dummy text, this is simply text copy that serves to fill a space without actually saying anything meaningful. It’s essentially nonsense text that still gives an idea of what real words will look like in the final product.

You might wonder why a designer would choose to use lorem ipsum text instead of a few paragraphs in English or their native language. Why not just copy and paste a page from an old book or lyrics from a famous song?

The main reason for using lorem ipsum text is that it keeps people from focusing on the actual text. When someone creates a template and asks for feedback on it, they don’t want the people reviewing it to get distracted by what the text says. Instead of focusing on the layout of the text, people might read the words to, for example, look for typos.

Where Did Lorem Ipsum Come From?

While lorem ipsum text looks like gibberish, it’s actually rooted in a real Latin text. It comes from Cicero’s 45 BC work “De finibus bonorum et malorum” (“On the ends of good and evil” in English), which is a look at ethics. The lorem ipsum text comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33.

However, the common lorem ipsum text we use today is not proper Latin. Compared to Cicero’s work, our lorem ipsum text is meaningless. It’s had words added, removed, and changed that result in something far from its initial form.

Dr. Richard McClintock discovered the source of the text when searching for the rare Latin word “consectetur” in classical literature. His search turned up Cicero’s work.

However, it’s unknown who made these modifications to the text, or exactly when, to turn it into the mess of words we know today. Sometime in the 1500s, an unknown printer scrambled words that have survived into the digital age.

As far as its modern usage, the earliest known use of lorem ipsum text as a placeholder was in the 1960s, when a company called Letraset used this text on its typeface sheets. Later, in the 1980s, the now-defunct company Adlus also used lorem ipsum placeholder text in its PageMaker desktop publishing software.