What is Lorem Ipsum?
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. Not only has it survived for 500 years, but it is also entered into use as dummy text for electronic documents, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularized 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 has been a long-established fact that a reader will be distracted by the text of a web 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” type. This makes it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default text, and a search for “Lorem Ipsum” will uncover many web sites using this text if they are in a state of development. Many versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (e.g., injected humour and the like).
Where does it come from?
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has its roots in a classic piece of Latin literature dating back to 45 BC, making it over 2,000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, spotted one of the most obscure Latin words, “consecteur”, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through various Latin texts, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “De Finnibus 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, popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in section 1.10.32
The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero’s “De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from H. Rackham’s 1914 translation.
Where can I get it?
There are many variations of Lorem Ipsum passages available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don’t look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn’t anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the only true generator on the internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with some useful sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. This generated Lorem Ipsum will always be free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.
