The origin of Lorem Ipsum: it isn’t just nonsense text
Even if you don’t know it by name, chances are you have come across Lorem Ipsum text – text used as a placeholder to show where the actual text will later appear on a website, in a leaflet or similar.
I’d always thought the text used was nonsense text, simply used to look vaguely plausible whilst filling up the space.
But in fact the Lorem Ipsum text is derived from Cicero no less:
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. 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, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable 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. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. (www.lipsum.com)
Cicero also, of course, knew a thing or two about social media. The use of his words in this way dates to an unknown sixteenth-century printer, who unknowingly created a habit that spread across the world and stuck for centuries.
This would be another of those “I thought everyone knew that” things, right? The guy who first got me using it told me where it was from. And then translated some of it, bloody public schoolboys showing off…
Well part of it does – it’s a bit jumbled up from the original, and some of the words aren’t even valid Latin, I am told.
Exactly what would have happened if its first typesetter used some odd lines of text previously set for a book of Latin speeches to fill in a space in something being laid out, and jumbled them up a bit in the process. Which we assume is how it started.