"Lorem Ipsum" Has a Meaning
Literally, it means, “[Su]ffering itself,” but there’s more to it than that!
Lorem Ipsum is the nonsense dummy text commonly used by designers and typesetters to lay out a page before the real text arrives for the big show. It’s the textual equivalent of a stand-in on a movie set helping the gaffer to get the lighting right while actual movie star Christian Bale hangs out in the wings and screams abuse at them. (For anyone wondering, that was a joke that would have slayed in 2009, around the time I lost the ability to generate useful new pop-culture references.) Lorem Ipsum is a handy tool for designers because it looks like language and has the same general word lengths as English, but reads as gibberish so that it won’t distract from the business of judging whether the page is laid out correctly, and — importantly — won’t accidentally get published as a finished product.
This doesn’t always work perfectly.
When I first encountered Lorem Ipsum, I was told that it was nonsense that looks a bit like Latin, which is certainly partially true!
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.
But the real secrets of its origin are revealed in its sixth word, consectetur, which happens to be the third-person singular present active subjunctive of the deponent Latin verb consector, which means “to pursue eagerly.” Helpfully, it’s a rare enough form that there aren’t many examples of it in the existing corpus of Latin, so it’s not hard to trace it back to its original context. Credit for figuring this out (some time in the ’90s) goes to Classics professor Richard McClintock, who sent in a correction to a magazine that had run an article defining Lorem Ipsum the same way it was originally explained to me: “It’s not Latin, though it looks like it, and it actually says nothing.” McClintock’s note indisputably pinpointed the source of Lorem Ipsum, but in the process introduced a red herring that has plagued almost everyone who’s written about it since.
First, the source: It’s Cicero. Specifically, it’s two garbled passages from De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (About the Ends of Good and Evil) stitched together, the first part of which reads (emphasis mine):
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.
The 1914 Loeb translation by Harris Rackham (which is going to prove weirdly important to this story!) renders this paragraph as:
Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.
Cicero, who had apparently never encountered a masochist, is saying that no one has ever pursued pain (dolorem) for its own sake, but sometimes, like, “no pain no gain” or whatever? (Cicero is smarter and more eloquent than I’m making him out to be.) `
But so why did this random butchered passage from Cicero end up as the standard text for typesetters to use when they wanted to see a layout that definitely wouldn’t get accidentally published?
According to almost everyone, this is a practice that dates back to the 16th century. In fact most sites that will generate Lorem Ipsum for you contain some version of the following gloss:
Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.
But a few things make this story very fishy. First, the only real source I can find for this claim comes from the original correction sent into that ’90s magazine by classicist and Lorem Ipsum sleuth Richard McClintock. After identifying the text as originating from Cicero, he goes on to say:
What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged.
This quote is also clearly the source for the almost identical mini-histories that appear on various Lorem Ipsum generators, and the fact has permeated the Internet to the extent that everyone’s favorite new harbinger of the AI apocalypse, Chat GPT, confidently repeated it (with a weird, unsubstantiated embellishment about Aldus Manutius) when I asked:
But this is all cast into serious doubt by none other than the Loeb translation we’ve already encountered. Notably, the facing-English-Latin text cuts off the word “dolorem” at precisely the right place in starting a new page (and this extensive comparison by Philippe Cibois shows that there are plenty of other coincidences), which almost certainly places the origin of Lorem Ipsum as a dummy text no later than 1914, when the first edition of Rackham’s Cicero translation was published.
The earliest example that anyone seems to have been able to find of Random Selections of the 1914 Loeb Facing Translation of Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero’s De Finibus Used as Dummy Text (aka, mercifully, Lorem Ipsum) is from the 1960s. At the time, if you wanted to mock up an ad or a flier for a punk show and you didn’t have a bunch of bespoke font settings on your Imperial Model 70 typewriter, your best bet was a British company called Letraset, which sold adhesive transfer sheets with different typefaces.
Letraset used Lorem Ipsum in their advertisements, and the layout-design-software company Aldus (maker of the popular PageMaker layout tool) duplicated the practice in the ’80s, which is presumably the origin point of ChatGPT’s tall tale about Aldus Manutius using Lorem Ipsum in the 16th Century.
So until someone digs up an earlier example, the best working theory of why designers and layout editors have been filling pages with a garbled version of a 1st Century BCE treatise that says, in so many words, “No pain, no gain,” for 60-odd years is that some marketing exec at Letraset tasked with generating placeholder text for an ad heroically declined to hit the pub with her colleagues and reached instead for her 1914 Loeb facing translation of De Finibus, then settled down to the hard, thankless task of absolutely butchering it.
Or as Cicero puts it, “The wise man always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.” It’s a statement that still crops up in some of the weirdest places.
Nowadays, there’s no shortage of Lorem Ipsum alternatives, including Nietzsche Ipsum, Delorean Ipsum, Pirate Ipsum, Cheese Ipsum, Cat Ipsum, and DJ Khaled Ipsum. I’d argue that there’s nothing quite as elegant as butchered Cicero if you have an urge to accidentally publish dummy text, but there are plenty of genuinely delightful alternatives to choose from.
