Lorem ipsum is a mangled Cicero quote
Designers’ favourite placeholder text is a scrambled passage from a 2,000-year-old book about pain and pleasure.
The original line in Cicero reads:
Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit… “Nor is there anyone who loves pain itself, who seeks it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain…”
Placeholder text starts mid-word: “lorem” is the end of dolorem. Words were then cut, shuffled and invented. Placeholder text is meant to look like language without being read, so that clients judge the layout and not the words.
Who found it
Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, noticed the rare word consectetur and went looking. He found the Cicero passage.
The often-repeated claim that printers have used it “since the 1500s” is not well documented. What is clear is that Letraset transfer sheets spread it in the 1960s, and desktop publishing software in the 1980s made it ubiquitous.
There is an irony in it: millions of mock-ups that ask you not to read the text are quoting a philosophical argument about avoiding pain.
Bring it up
“Lorem ipsum, the fake text on every website mock-up, is a garbled passage from Cicero about pain.”
Follow the thread
- RelatedEsperanto has native speakers Two kinds of language built on purpose: one to be read by everyone, one to be read by no one.
- Same patternWhy do we say “OK”? Both are everyday words whose real origin was a mystery until a scholar did the archival work.
- Same patternThe scream that has been in hundreds of films Stock material reused so often that it becomes a quiet shared tradition.
