Latin text used in templates

The passage is attributed to an unknown typesetter in the 15th century who is thought to have scrambled parts of Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum for use in a type specimen book. It usually begins with:. The purpose of lorem ipsum is to create a natural looking block of text sentence, paragraph, page, etc. 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.

The passage experienced a surge in popularity during the s when Letraset used it on their dry-transfer sheets, and again during the 90s as desktop publishers bundled the text with their software. Today it's seen all around the web; on templates, websites, and stock designs. Use our generator to get your own, or read on for the authoritative history of lorem ipsum. Until recently, the prevailing view assumed lorem ipsum was born as a nonsense text.

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.

In particular, the garbled words of lorem ipsum bear an unmistakable resemblance to sections 1. A English translation by Harris Rackham reads:. Creation timelines for the standard lorem ipsum passage vary, with some citing the 15th century and others the 20th. So how did the classical Latin become so incoherent? According to McClintock, 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.

It's difficult to find examples of lorem ipsum in use before Letraset made it popular as a dummy text in the s, although McClintock says he remembers coming across the lorem ipsum passage in a book of old metal type samples. So far he hasn't relocated where he once saw the passage, but the popularity of Cicero in the 15th century supports the theory that the filler text has been used for centuries. But it seems reasonable to imagine that there was a version in use far before the age of Letraset.

As an alternative theory , and because Latin scholars do this sort of thing someone tracked down a Latin edition of De Finibus which challenges McClintock's 15th century claims and suggests that the dawn of lorem ipsum was as recent as the 20th century.

Whether a medieval typesetter chose to garble a well-known but non-Biblical—that would have been sacrilegious text, or whether a quirk in the Loeb Edition inspired a graphic designer, it's admittedly an odd way for Cicero to sail into the 21st century.

Lorem ipsum was purposefully designed to have no meaning, but appear like real text, making it the perfect placeholder. If you already tried, you may have gotten anything from "NATO" to "China" , depending on how you capitalized the letters.

One brave soul did take a stab at translating the almost-not-quite-Latin. Here is the classic lorem ipsum passage followed by Boparai's odd, yet mesmerizing version:.

Bits of it have surprising power: the desperate insistence on loving and pursuing sorrow, for instance, that is cheated out of its justification — an incomplete object that has been either fished for, or wished for. Lorem ipsum was popularized in the s with Letraset's dry-transfer sheets, and later entered the digital world via Aldus PageMaker.

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. Aldus Corporation, which later merged with Adobe Systems, ushered lorem ipsum into the information age with its desktop publishing software Aldus PageMaker.

The program came bundled with lorem ipsum dummy text for laying out page content, and other word processors like Microsoft Word followed suit. More recently the growth of web design has helped proliferate lorem ipsum across the internet as a placeholder for future text—and in some cases the final content this is why we proofread, kids. Some claim lorem ipsum threatens to promote design over content, while others defend its value in the process of planning. Among design professionals, there's a bit of controversy surrounding the filler text.

Controversy, as in Death to Lorem Ipsum. The strength of lorem ipsum is its weakness: it doesn't communicate. To some, designing a website around placeholder text is unacceptable, akin to sewing a custom suit without taking measurements. Kristina Halvorson notes:. Lorem ipsum is so ubiquitous because it is so versatile. Select how many paragraphs you want, copy, paste, and break the lines wherever it is convenient. Real copy doesn't work that way. As front-end developer Kyle Fiedler put it :.

There's no need to adjust your browser or change your eyeglasses. These Latin-esque words are a portion of a common placeholder text file familiar to most graphic artists and typesetters.

It's an example of dummy text used by graphic artists and the typesetting industry for years. The Lorem ipsum text is not gibberish; it started life as an actual translation of classical Latin literature. Since then, it has been copied over and over again, scrambled and reposted on the internet, sometimes with humorous or off-color alterations.

Dummy text is also referred to as placeholder text or inaccurately greeked text. Its purpose differs depending on how and where it is used. For large areas of type, you can copy the first paragraph of this article and paste it over and over again as needed or use the entire version. To use the placeholder text, paste it in your document where the missing text will go and apply your desired font styles and other formatting options.

When you receive the actual copy for your project, replace the placeholder text with the real text. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Katakana and hiragana cluster in strings between 1 to 4 chars at random points in each paragraph. Hiragana occurs more often at the end of sentences, rather in clumps of 1 to 4 chars rather than just single chars.

Katakana is very unlikely to appear as a single character in Japanese text, but hiragana could. Exclamation and question marks are 'double-byte', not standard ascii ones. This is based on Jugemu , a Japanese folktale with a humorous repetition of a ridiculously long name. It is often used in training sessions for Rakugo entertainers. All of the above are transliterations of the classic Lorem ipsum, letter by letter or its closest approximation. As hardly anyone actually speaks them their use should be innocuous.

The dictionaries are based on the coresponding Wikipedia articles. We provide information on Lorem Ipsum , aka. Lipsum , its application and etymology, whether for print, typesetting or web design, placeholders, and copyfitting text for desktop publishing.

Lorem ipsum is a pseudo-Latin text used in web design, typography, layout, and printing in place of English to emphasise design elements over content. It's also called placeholder or filler text. It's a convenient tool for mock-ups. It helps to outline the visual elements of a document or presentation, eg typography, font, or layout.

Lorem ipsum is mostly a part of a Latin text by the classical author and philosopher Cicero. Its words and letters have been changed by addition or removal, so to deliberately render its content nonsensical; it's not genuine, correct, or comprehensible Latin anymore. While lorem ipsum 's still resembles classical Latin, it actually has no meaning whatsoever.

As Cicero's text doesn't contain the letters K, W, or Z, alien to latin, these, and others are often inserted randomly to mimic the typographic appearence of European languages, as are digraphs not to be found in the original. In a professional context it often happens that private or corporate clients corder a publication to be made and presented with the actual content still not being ready.

Think of a news blog that's filled with content hourly on the day of going live. However, reviewers tend to be distracted by comprehensible content, say, a random text copied from a newspaper or the internet. The are likely to focus on the text, disregarding the layout and its elements. Besides, random text risks to be unintendedly humorous or offensive, an unacceptable risk in corporate environments.

Lorem ipsum and its many variants have been employed since the early ies, and quite likely since the sixteenth century. Most of its text is made up from sections 1. Neque porro quisquam est qui do lorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci v elit is the first known version "Neither is there anyone who loves grief itself since it is grief and thus wants to obtain it".

It was found by Richard McClintock, a philologist, director of publications at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia; he searched for citings of consectetur in classical Latin literature, a term of remarkably low frequency in that literary corpus. Cicero famously orated against his political opponent Lucius Sergius Catilina.

Occasionally the first Oration against Catiline is taken for type specimens: Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience? And for how long will that madness of yours mock us? Cicero's version of Liber Primus first Book , sections 1. Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa, quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt, explicabo.

Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui do lorem ipsum , quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci[ng] v elit, sed quia non numquam [do] eius mod i tempor a inci[di]dunt, ut labore et dolore magna m aliquam quaerat voluptatem.

Ut enim ad minim a veniam, quis nostru m exercitation em ullam co rporis suscipit labori o s am, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commod i consequat ur? Quis aute m vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse , quam nihil molestiae c onsequatur, vel illum , qui dolore m eu m fugiat , quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness.

No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again 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.

To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish.

In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.

Both contained the variant lorem ipsum most common today. Laura Perry, then art director with Aldus, modified prior versions of Lorem Ipsum text from typographical specimens; in the s and s it appeared often in lettering catalogs by Letraset. Anecdotal evidence has it that Letraset used Lorem ipsum already from onwards, eg. Many early desktop publishing programs, eg. Adobe PageMaker, used it to create template.