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We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about the surprising histories behind names like “ASDA”, “wi-fi”, “Tesco”, “Quality Street“, and “Lego”.
But the first time I came across “lorem ipsum”, the text that sometimes automatically fills in a blank document, I figured its past was obvious – Latin, right?
And yes, while it looks like nonsense to me, I thought I didn’t understand it because I’m not even remotely fluent in the classical language.
As it turns out, though, the “dummy text” isn’t “proper” Latin at all; in fact, it’s sometimes known as “Greek copy”.
What is “lorem ipsum”?
It’s the first two words of a paragraph that people like graphic designers and typesetters use to show what text will look like on a finished product before it’s actually been written.
You might sometimes see it used to show what a font looks like too.
It’s been used as the “standard dummy print” since the 1500s.
The full paragraph reads:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing 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.
What does “lorem ipsum” mean?
It (sort of) means nothing – but in the ’90s, a scholar did find out the actual source it was based on.
“Loerm ipsum” and its following lines are “psuedo-Latin,” the Cambridge Dictionary explained. It uses Latin or Latin-like words, but is “garbled”.
For a long time, people thought the words lorem ipsum was based on were random, too.
But a professor and Latin scholar named Rob McClintock made a pretty remarkable discovery about the “nonsense” text – he found the original passage on which it seems to have been based.
The Classics expert noted the use of an unusual word, “consectetur”, in the lorem ipsum paragraph.
After scouring ancient texts for the term, he found that the infamous section seems to have come from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, or The Extremes of Good and Evil, by Cicero – written in 45 BC.
The first line comes from a line in section 1.10.32, the London School of Economics and Political Science added.
In the original text, the first line reads:
Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.
Merriam-Webster explained that the lorem ipsum paragraph we see now is a “garbled” version of these passages, “broken and truncated”.
As for why it’s scrambled, that’s kind of the point: legible text you can actually read might distract from the design of the document, which is what lorem ipsum is supposed to show.
“The point of lorem ipsum is that it looks just realistic enough to work as a demonstration, yet signifies nothing,” the dictionary stated.
