Many web designers use the long latin-looking passage starting with “
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua” or something similar. You can find it on webpage templates everywhere. I’m sure you’ve seen it (possibly even in Microsoft Word templates) or even used it yourself. But do you know what it means? Have you ever wondered?
It actually doesn’t mean much of anything.
Lorem Ipsum is actually dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. It has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500’s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived five centuries and 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 web design and desktop publishing.
Lorem Ipsum is not just random text, though. 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 from a Lorem Ipsum passage and discovered 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. The passage “Lorem ipsum …” is taken from text that reads, “Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit …,” which translates as, “There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain….”
Why is it used? 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 web designers now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a google search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will give you results of many site templates and uncompleated sites. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).
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