Have you ever been presented a web design sample and seen a scramble of Latin text? Most likely, what you were looking at was Lorem Ipsum filler text.
Although it’s always preferable to work in designs with the actual content, Lorem Ipsum is used as a temporary placeholder when the real text is not yet available.
The Lorem ipsum text looks real enough that a website design looks complete and can be shown to the client for approval.
Where does it come from?
Lorem Ipsum has no meaning, however, looks very similar to real text. Lorem Ipsum is not just random text. It contains a series of actual Latin words.
Lorem Ipsum is in fact a scrambled section from ancient Roman philosopher Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum Et Malorum (“On The Ends of Good and Evil”) written in 45 BC.
The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in section 1.10.32.
Why do we use it?
It is a fact that when looking at a website layout you can be distracted by readable content. Lorem Ipsum has a normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here, content here’, making it look like readable English.
Besides the standard Lorem Ipsum, there are many funnier alternatives such as Coffee Ipsum, Samuel L. Ipsum, or Pahu (Māori text generator).