What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dumm

y text of the printing and typ

sesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum

has been the industry's standard

d dummy text ever since the 1500s,

• when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a

1. type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries,

• but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining ess

entially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the

and more recently with desktop publishing software like A

ldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will

^{be distracted by the readable content of a page}

_{when looking at its layout. The point of using Lo}

al distribution of letters, as opposed to using '

Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. M

any desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use

Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem

ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versi

ons have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident,

sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not s

imply random text. It has roots in a piece of classic

cal Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over

 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin profe

ssor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, loo

ked 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. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.

Where can I get some?

There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn't anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.