From its medieval origins to the digital era, learn everything there is to know about the ubiquitous lorem ipsum passage.

The passage experienced a surge in popularity during the 1960s when Letraset used it on their dry-transfer sheets, and again during the 90s as desktop publishers bundled the text with their software.

Lorem ipsum began as scrambled, nonsensical Latin derived from Cicero's 1st-century BC text De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum.

Until recently, the prevailing view assumed lorem ipsum was born as a nonsense text. “It's not Latin, though it looks like it, and it actually says nothing,”

The placeholder text, beginning with the line “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit”, looks like Latin because in its youth, centuries ago, it was Latin.

In particular, the garbled words of lorem ipsum bear an unmistakable resemblance to sections 1.10.32–33 of Cicero's work, with the most notable passage excerpted below