What you’ll learn

Contrary to what many think, Lorem Ipsum isn’t just random text. It originates from a classical Latin work dating back to 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, explored the obscure Latin word ‘consectetur’ from a Lorem Ipsum excerpt and traced its roots in classical literature. The text comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero’s “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil), a treatise on ethics popular during the Renaissance. The famous opening line, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, is derived from section 1.10.32. Below is the standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s, along with the original Latin sections and their English translations from H. Rackham’s 1914 version.

It’s a well-known fact that readers can be distracted by the content of a page when examining its layout. The purpose of using Lorem Ipsum is that it maintains a fairly normal letter distribution, unlike phrases like ‘Content here, content here’, which don’t resemble readable English. Many desktop publishing tools and web editors now default to Lorem Ipsum as their model text, and searching for ‘lorem ipsum’ reveals numerous websites still in development. Over the years, various versions have emerged, sometimes accidentally and sometimes intentionally, often with added humor.

Numerous variations of Lorem Ipsum passages exist, but most have been altered in some way, either through added humor or random words that seem implausible. If you’re planning to use a Lorem Ipsum passage, ensure there’s nothing embarrassing hidden within the text. Most Lorem Ipsum generators online tend to repeat standard chunks, making this the first genuine generator on the web. It utilizes a dictionary of over 200 Latin words combined with a few model sentence structures to produce coherent Lorem Ipsum, free from repetition or irrelevant words.