The History of Lorem Ipsum
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit..."
If you are a web developer or a designer, you have undoubtedly seen this phrase thousands of times. It is the industry standard placeholder text used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a webpage without relying on meaningful content.
Where Did It Come From?
Lorem Ipsum isn't just random gibberish. It actually has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old! 🏛️
It comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Marcus Tullius Cicero. The text was scrambled in the 1500s by an unknown printer who took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.
Why Do We Still Use It?
The primary purpose of Lorem Ipsum is to distract the viewer from the content so they can focus on the design. If you use readable English text as a placeholder, clients will invariably start reading the text and critiquing the grammar instead of reviewing the typography and layout.
Lorem Ipsum has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, making it look like readable English without actually meaning anything.
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