The Strange History of Lorem Ipsum: How Cicero’s Words Became the World’s Favorite Placeholder Text

Though sel­dom heard these days, the term “desk­top pub­lish­ing” once opened a great many eyes to the promise of the per­son­al com­put­er. It meant that one could cre­ate a pub­li­ca­tion with­out own­ing a press or con­tract­ing with an out­fit that did. Indeed, the whole process of writ­ing, design, and print­ing could take place on one’s desk, pro­vid­ed one had fur­nished it with the right com­put­er and acces­sories. From the mid-eight­ies through the ear­ly nineties, that meant an Apple Mac­in­tosh equipped with a Laser­Writer print­er and a copy of Aldus Page­Mak­er. For the first time, ordi­nary com­put­er users could cre­ate newslet­ters, brochures, and oth­er doc­u­ments assured that “what you see” onscreen is “what you get,” a fea­ture abbre­vi­at­ed as WYSIWYG.

That’s not the only strange-look­ing piece of text encoun­tered by ear­ly desk­top pub­lish­ers. Since Page­Mak­er enabled users to cre­ate a lay­out before even hav­ing the words to fill it, it need­ed dum­my text to occu­py the emp­ty spaces in order to pro­vide a rea­son­able approx­i­ma­tion of how the print­ed result would look. “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isc­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua,” that dum­my text begins, and it con­tin­ues as long as its defined field allows, repeat­ing itself as nec­es­sary. It may resem­ble Latin, but any­one with a decent under­stand­ing of that lan­guage won’t have to read much before notic­ing how odd­ly man­gled it is. So where did this mys­te­ri­ous text, still famil­iar to all lay­out edi­tors and graph­ic design­ers, actu­al­ly come from?

Pur­su­ing an answer to that ques­tion in her new video above, Rab­bit Hole cre­ator Emi­ly Zhang talks to indi­vid­u­als with rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence includ­ing Lau­ra Per­ry, the for­mer cre­ative direc­tor at Aldus (a com­pa­ny named, inci­den­tal­ly, for the fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry Venet­ian print­er Aldus Manu­tius). It was she who first made Lorem ipsum dig­i­tal, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly used it as a whol­ly ana­log graph­ic design­er in the form of rub-off Letraset sheets. She man­u­al­ly entered it straight into Page­Mak­er off one such sheet, mak­ing occa­sion­al typos along the way. That was just anoth­er phase of trans­for­ma­tion Lorem ipsum had been under­go­ing since Cicero’s words were first bor­rowed — and chopped up, and mixed with frag­ments of oth­er lan­guages — to cre­ate what became the indus­try-stan­dard dum­my text.

In the process of fill­ing the gaps in this sto­ry, Zhang also talks to Richard McClin­tock, a pro­fes­sor of Latin long acknowl­edged as the pre­mier expert on Lorem ipsum. Ulti­mate­ly, she unearths a few truths that are new even to him, includ­ing an impor­tant one about the 1966 meet­ing at Letraset in which the idea was first float­ed of a sin­gle piece of dum­my text that could sub­sti­tute for most West­ern lan­guages. It was James Mosley, the high­ly knowl­edge­able head librar­i­an at the St. Bride Print­ing Library, who deliv­ered Letraset the Cicero quo­ta­tion orig­i­nal­ly known as Forum ipsum, “which had become gar­bled by more than one type­set­ter sit­ting at his bench since the mid-fif­teen-hun­dreds.” Like­ly to remain in use as long as human­i­ty puts words on pages — paper, dig­i­tal, or what­ev­er comes next — Lorem ipsum sure­ly has a few more forms to take.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Lorem Ipsum: How Scram­bled Text by Cicero Became Used by Type­set­ters Every­where

Explore a New Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of Print­ing Types, the Author­i­ta­tive His­to­ry of Print­ing & Typog­ra­phy from 1922

How Mag­a­zine Pages Were Cre­at­ed Before Com­put­ers: A Vet­er­an of the Lon­don Review of Books Demon­strates the Metic­u­lous, Man­u­al Process

The End of an Era: A Short Film About The Last Day of Hot Met­al Type­set­ting at The New York Times (1978)

Why Learn Latin?: 5 Videos Make a Com­pelling Case That the “Dead Lan­guage” Is an “Eter­nal Lan­guage”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.