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. 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 designers and publishers use it?
Readers tend to focus on readable content, which can pull attention away from layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, rather than repetitive phrases like 'Content here, content here', so it looks like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default placeholder text. A search for 'lorem ipsum' will reveal many sites still in early development. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes intentionally (with 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, meaning it is 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. By tracing citations of the word in classical literature, he identified the 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. That book is a treatise on ethics and was popular during the Renaissance. The famous first line, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", appears 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 from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in their original form, followed by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.