Lorem ipsum

In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. "Lorem ipsum" may be used as a placeholder before final copy is available. It is also used to temporarily replace text in a process called greeking, which allows designers to consider the form of a webpage or publication, without the meaning of the text influencing the design.
"Lorem ipsum" is typically a corrupted version of , a 1st century BC text by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical and improper Latin.
Versions of the "Lorem ipsum" text have been used in typesetting at least since the 1960s, when it was popularized by advertisements for Letraset transfer sheets. "Lorem ipsum" was introduced to the digital world in the mid-1980s, when Aldus employed it in graphic and word-processing templates for its desktop publishing program PageMaker. Other popular word processors, including Pages and Microsoft Word, have since adopted "Lorem ipsum", as have many LaTeX packages, web content managers such as Joomla! and WordPress, and CSS libraries such as Semantic UI.
Example text.
A common form of "Lorem ipsum" reads:
Source text.
The "Lorem ipsum" text is derived from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero's . The physical source may have been the 1914 Loeb Classical Library edition of , where the Latin text, presented on the left-hand (even) pages, breaks off on page 34 with " and continues on page 36 with ", suggesting that the galley type of that page was mixed up to make the dummy text seen today.
The discovery of the text's origin is attributed to Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden–Sydney College. McClintock connected "Lorem ipsum" to Cicero's writing sometime before 1982 while searching for instances of the Latin word , which was rarely used in classical literature. McClintock first published his discovery in a 1994 letter to the editor of "Before & After" magazine, contesting the editor's earlier claim that "Lorem ipsum" held no meaning.
The relevant section of Cicero as printed in the source is reproduced below with fragments used in "Lorem ipsum" underlined. Letters in brackets were added to "Lorem ipsum" and were not present in the source text:
What follows is 's translation, as printed in the Loeb Classical Library edition, with words at least partially represented in "Lorem ipsum" underlined: