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Hedonist Roots
Until recently, the prevailing view assumed lorem ipsum was born as a nonsense text. “It’s not Latin, though it looks like it, and it actually says nothing,” Before & After magazine answered a curious reader, “Its ‘words’ loosely approximate the frequency with which letters occur in English, which is why at a glance it looks pretty real.”
As Cicero would put it, “Um, not so fast.”
The placeholder text, beginning with the line “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit”, looks like Latin because in its youth, centuries ago, it was Latin.
Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar from Hampden-Sydney College, is credited with discovering the source behind the ubiquitous filler text. In seeing a sample of lorem ipsum, his interest was piqued by consectetur—a genuine, albeit rare, Latin word. Consulting a Latin dictionary led McClintock to a passage from De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (“On the Extremes of Good and Evil”), a first-century B.C. text from the Roman philosopher Cicero.
In particular, the garbled words of lorem ipsum bear an unmistakable resemblance to sections 1.10.32–33 of Cicero’s work, with the most notable passage excerpted below:
“Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.”
A 1914 English translation by Harris Rackham reads:
“Nor is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.”
McClintock’s eye for detail certainly helped narrow the whereabouts of lorem ipsum’s origin, however, the “how and when” still remain something of a mystery, with competing theories and timelines.
Fuzzy Beginnings
Creation timelines for the standard lorem ipsum passage vary, but its believed to have originated with Letraset in the 1960s.
Typesetter selecting typeRemixing a Classic
So how did the classical Latin become so incoherent? At first, McClintock claimed that a 15th century typesetter likely scrambled part of Cicero's De Finibus in order to provide placeholder text to mockup various fonts for a type specimen book.
As McClintock wrote in the Before & After Magazine to explain his discovery:
“What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occasional ‘ing’ or ‘y’ thrown in. It's ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase ‘it’s Greek to me’ and ‘greeking’ have common semantic roots!” (The editors published his letter in a correction headlined “Lorem Oopsum”).
Since then, McClintock has corrected his own claim by tracking down a 1914 Loeb Classical Library Edition translation of De Finibus by H. Rackham. The 1914 Loeb Classical Library Edition ran out of room on page 36 for the Latin phrase “dolorem ipsum” (sorrow in itself). Thus, the truncated phrase leaves one page dangling with “do-”, while another begins with the now ubiquitous “lorem ipsum”.
Further work by Richard McClintock, Philippe Cibois, and Emily Zhang have now matched parts of the original Letraset lorem ipsum text to the entirety of page 36, smoothly continuing onto the entire pages 56, 70, and 118, further affirming this 1914 translation was likely the origin of the text. Not the 1500s!
The story of Letraset taking up this text remains somewhat murky, but it’s believed that librarian and type expert James Mosley at the St. Bride Printing Library, who had a close relationship wtih Letraset, helped develop lorem ipsum for their Body Type product in 1966. No matter the exact origins, it's admittedly an odd way for Cicero to sail into the 21st century.
Meaning of Lorem Ipsum
Lorem ipsum was purposefully designed to have no meaning, but appear like real text, making it the perfect placeholder.
Letraset transfer sheets