If you’ve ever seen an unfinished website or print layout, you’ve likely seen chunks of text that begin “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” This dummy text is simply a placeholder, so it’s not meant to mean anything. But why do we use that text specifically?
Few people know the true answer to that question, which led Emily Zhang, creator of the YouTube channel Rabbit Hole, to deep dive into the history of “Lorem ipsum.” As it turns out, what we thought we knew about it was largely wrong. Not only that, but Zhang’s investigation revealed a delightfully human story of oopsies, ah-has, and eh-close-enoughs that resulted in the mysterious Latin-ish placeholder text.
“What Lorem ipsum actually is,” Zhang said, “is a far stranger series of decisions that lived beyond anyone’s expectations to become the most famous nonsense text in the world, and an unsolved mystery.”
The mysteries of Lorem ipsum
First, let’s go over some common misperceptions and what we thought we knew that turned out to be wrong.
Many people assume “Lorem ipsum” text is Latin, and a lot of it is. But “lorem” itself is not a Latin word. And in many iterations of the text, letters that don’t even exist in Latin show up.
Those anomalies have led people to believe it’s simply a Latin form of gibberish, but that’s not really true, either. Another belief is that it originated with a typesetter in the 1500s. But that turned out to be an accidental misunderstanding based on a throwaway comment by an academic who never thought people would run with it.
Essentially, there’s been a lot of lore surrounding Lorem ipsum, but there’s never been a definitive history of it written. No academic papers on it exist. And no experts have fully explored questions like: Why is it kind of Latin but kind of not? Where did it originally come from and when? Who decided to use it in the first place?
A former Latin professor sheds new light on the old text
Zhang spoke to Richard McClintock, former Latin professor and publications director at Hampden-Sydney College. McClintock had responded to an assertion in Before & After Magazine that Lorem ipsum was intentionally meaningless. He had done his own deep dive into where it originated, and had found it in Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum, which translates as “On the Ends of Good and Evil.” The lesser-known work was written around 45 BCE.
But the direct Lorem ipsum text differs from Cicero’s. There’s a word ending in “ng” in the modern text, a letter combination that doesn’t exist in Latin. The “v” had been removed from the word “velit” to become just “elit.” And where did the not-really-a-word “Lorem” come from?
McClintock solved the “Lorem” mystery with a printed version of the Cicero text published in a 1914 book. The sentence starts at the end of one page: “Neque porro quisquam est qui do-” and continues on the next page turn: “lorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet,consectetur, adipisci velit.” So “Lorem” is actually part of the word “dolorem.”
It appears someone took the words from page 36 of a 1914 version of a 2000-year-old text to use as a placeholder. But who and why, and how did it get altered over time?
How Lorem ipsum typos ended up in 1987 software
Zhang had the origin, but there was a big gap between the 1914 book and the use of Lorem ipsum in the Aldus Pagemaker page formatting software in 1987 (the oldest documented use of it she had found). So, she set off to find the people responsible for that.
She tracked down Laura Perry, the person who added Lorem ipsum to the Aldus Pagemaker program as a tool option. She’d remembered the Lorem ipsum text from when she had used Letraset, a dry transfer method of lettering created in the 1960s. Basically, they were letter decals you could rub onto paper rather than having to stencil letters by hand. Perry told Zhang that Letraset had a page of Lorem ipsum text to differentiate body text from other lettering types. Lorem ipsum allowed designers to easily play with layouts.
But to get Lorem ipsum into Pagemaker, Perry had to type the text by hand. She typed quickly and made a bunch of typos. But since she wasn’t sure whether the text was copyrighted, she allowed the typos to stay, hoping the mistakes would protect her.
“If you see a nibh, zzril, or consectetuer with an extra E, that’s Laura’s Lorem ipsum,” Zhang shares.
The librarian who created Lorem ipsum for Letraset in the 1960s
Zhang tracked down a 1966 Letraset Lorem ipsum page on eBay. Comparing it to the 1914 Cicero text, she found it did take text from the top of page 36. But then it skipped about 20 pages to take more text, then did the same thing a couple more times.
And some other languages got tucked into the Lorem ipsum text as well. A few Spanish words appear here, a few French words there. Letters like J,K, Y, and Z that aren’t part of the Latin alphabet were added. And some words were removed from the original Cicero text as well.
Zhang received an email from Dave Farey, one of the earliest designers at Letraset, who shared this story with her:
“At a marketing meeting sometime during 1966, publicity design manager Colin Orchard mentioned that a sheet of dummy text would be useful for his work, and also for graphic designers generally. They needed more expertise, but fortunately, Letraset had developed a strong relationship with the Saint Bride Printing Library, and the head librarian, James Mosley. James was an academic who devoted his professional life to the history and contemporary use of printing and typography. James realized that all type founders in Europe and the USA use their own placeholder text in their own language, and he looked to an alternative.”
Unfortunately, Mosley died in 2025, so no one can ask him why he chose Lorem ipsum specifically. We may never know why he altered the text the way he did. But here we are.
Zhang’s research made Lorem ipsum sources change their story
Several websites dedicated to the famous dummy text have claimed that Lorem ipsum was created by a typsetter in the 1500s. But that was based on a throwaway comment McClintock put into his Before & After correction, not an actual fact. After Zhang’s deep dive revealed more information than previous digging had uncovered, those sites corrected their histories.
There are still mysteries in the Lorem ipsum lore, but we now know a lot more about it than we did. Zhang’s investigation not only gave us new insights into the history of Lorem ipsum, but it also showed what a focused individual with a desire to find answers can do.
For more fascinating deep dives, you can follow Rabbit Hole on YouTube.
