Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet: What it Means

Every Newfangled client has seen this text at some point or another:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing 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.

When we create a grayscreen prototype for a new site, we fill all of the content areas with this phony “Lorem Ipsum” copy. It's meant to simulate text areas that the client will eventually fill with actual, meaningful copy once the site is complete.

One of my main duties as a Project Manager Assistant is to work on our prototypes... So I've seen my fair share of Lorem Ipsum already. I've also seen it on sites-in-progress at other companies, and I started to wonder where exactly this standardized technical gibberish comes from.

According to lipsum.com:

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… It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old... Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance.

Wikipedia has the translation for one of the more common passages of Lorem Ipsum (seen at the top of this entry):

Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

There seem to be different versions of Lorem Ipsum floating around the internet-- most starting with the generic “Lorem ipsum...” line. Some variations are meant to more closely reflect spacing patterns of common text, while others simply appear to be poking fun at the whole concept.

My personal favorite, found in some of our Newfangled prototypes: “Et harumd und lookum like Greek to me.“