Lorem ipsum - WikiHQ

thumb|right|An example of the Lorem ipsum placeholder text on a Letraset sample sheet. Date unknown, possibly 1970s.

Lorem ipsum ( ) is a dummy or placeholder text commonly used in graphic design, publishing, and web development. It 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. The first two words are the truncation of ("pain itself"). Lorem ipsums purpose is to permit a page layout to be designed, independently of the copy that will subsequently populate it, or to demonstrate various fonts of a typeface without meaningful text that could be distracting.

Versions of the Lorem ipsum text have been used in typesetting since the 1960s, when advertisements for Letraset transfer sheets popularized it. 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 by searching for recorded uses of the Latin word , which was rarely used in classical literature. McClintock first published his discovery in a 1994 letter to a Before & After magazine editor, contesting the editor's earlier claim that Lorem ipsum had no meaning.