"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."

"There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..."

Cicero.

Lorem Ipsum or Lipsum is the name given to a dummy text used when designing the layout of printed material. A standard, Latin-based text has been used for centuries within the printing industry and is still alive in the world of electronic media.

Why Lorem Ipsum is used

When words are layed out well on the page, not only is the result more aesthetically pleasing, but there can be great benefits for readability and the ease with which specfic information is found.

Typography (also known as typeseting or compositing) is a delicate artform. The typographer seeks to adjust the 'white spaces' (margins, column widths, headers and footers, gutters, line spaces or leading, the space between characters or kerning - and many other variables) and the printed matter (the words and picture) on the page to achieve a desired effect.

In the early days of Guttenberg and Caxton, books were laid out page by page. However, as techniques developed and more and more books were printed, it became convenient to try to define consistent page layouts to be used throughout a book, and even from book to book. Such layouts would have to be consistently pleasing no matter what text was used on them.

Now, when readers looks at a page of text, the way they process an image depends not only on the layout, but also on the content. For example, In the following block of text, something may well leap out at you:

Wasgsg sup hdhet jdoejk nelsm nnnsoap bsieidn bbb s jkiodhjhj jdhdhj idhd hhdio ihfrhfhj ifuirfj iwehf rhjf ifrjir otjtopt ijfn ee Douglas Adams ifhjrfh gerd hdheu kfrhjfh ofdj kkjdidjj ojkfjfh kk d kjmaodk ldnmd kmkjkd owkdk dkeldk kkl klkl

See how the eye is drawn towards meaning? It's a little like the 'Cocktail Party Phenomenon' whereby our ears prick up when we hear our name against background chatter.

So, to avoid such conflicts, it's probably not helpful to use dummy English texts to test a layout. On the other hand - random letter sequences - bdgdgdh lksoon jkjsn - don't work very well either. They just don't look like words because the balance between vowels and consonants and the variability in word lengths are all wrong. This is where Lorem Ipsum comes in.

The history of Lorem Ipsum

In the 1500s, typeographers hit upon the idea of using a dummy Latin text as the basis for their layout, as follows:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

A passage such as this has the advantage of looking like real words, without the distraction of meaning.

But any Latin scholars amongst us shouldn't worry if it doesn't make complete sense to you either. For many years it was believed that it was a random, nonsense text. However, Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up some of the more obscure words in the passage and searched for their citations in scholarly texts. He has established that Lorem Ipsum is derived from two paragraphs of Cicero's 'De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum' (The Extremes of Good and Evil), written around 45 BCE. It is somewhat scrambled from the original, with words interchanged and syllables missing.

Lorem Ipsum in modern times.

Lorem Ipsum has continued to be used by typographers to design pages, with various variants of the text being used. It is sometimes known as 'Greeking'. It first emerged in a new medium in the 1960s when the standard Lorem Ipsum text became available as Letraset™ sheets.

Lorem Ipsum has now leapt into the 21st Century with renewed vigour with its incorporation into desktop publishing applications. It is also to be found buried within the depths of Microsoft Word's Help pages¹. Several websites are available which will generate Lorem Ipsum pasages of a desired length, including versions in various languages such as Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Greek (and Lëtzebuergesch² and Esperanto and Interlingua and Volapük³ and Morse and L33tspk and Quenya)
⁴. Lorem Ipsum is also extremely useful in laying out usable web pages. Those concerned with ergonomics are keen to ensure that there is consistency across the pages of a site and users are able to find information and links easily.

In a fascinating twist, Lorem Ipsum has also become a spoken language - albeit a fictional one. In the novel, 'Something Rotten' by Jasper Fforde, part of his Thursday Next literary detective series set in Swindon, Ms Next's toddler son, Friday, is brought up within the pages of fiction following the eradication of his father by time travellers before he had met Ms Next. (It's a complicated story...better to read the book!). He grows up burbling phrases of Lipsum that only his mother and their pet dodos can understand.

Further Reading

lorem-ipsum.info and lipsum.com - two Lorem Ipsum generator sites.

A site on the History of Printing.

Jasper Fforde's website, with a wealth of information on Swindon, toast and the adventures of Thursday Next.