History, Purpose and Usage
Lorem ipsum, or lipsum as it is sometimes known, is dummy text used in laying out print, graphic or web designs. The passage is attributed to Letraset, a popular manufacturer of dry transfer sheets for text and other design elements.
It is believed that they scrambled parts of Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum in the 1960s for use in their Body Type (basically body paragraph placeholder) sheets. It usually begins with:
“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.”
The purpose of lorem ipsum is to create a natural looking block of text (sentence, paragraph, page, etc.) that doesn't distract from the layout. A practice not without controversy, laying out pages with meaningless filler text can be very useful when the focus is meant to be on design, not content.
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.”
McClint’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.
Digital Ipsum
The decade that brought us Star Trek and Doctor Who also resurrected Cicero—or at least what used to be Cicero—in an attempt to make the days before computerized design a little less painstaking.
The French lettering company Letraset manufactured a set of dry-transfer sheets which included the lorem ipsum filler text in a variety of fonts, sizes, and layouts. These sheets of lettering could be rubbed on anywhere and were quickly adopted by graphic artists, printers, architects, and advertisers for their professional look and ease of use.
Remixing 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.
