What is Lorem Ipsum ?

Lorem Ipsum is a piece of scrambled Latin known as "greeking". How's that again? Well it's really quite simple...

When you're designing a standard layout for text it's useful to have some dummy text to play with. Long ago printers discovered that it was best to use a piece of nonsense because that helps you concentrate on the design instead of reading the article. This nonsense is called greeking.

The most commonly used piece of greeking is actually a piece of scrambled Latin which begins with the words "lorem ipsum".

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.

This passage has been in use since the 1500s. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, discovered that this text is not random, but is in fact a mixed up version of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC.

So why is this site called lorem ipsum? There really should be a clever answer about the site being the web equivalent of a printer's sample book, but really I just put that up there until I thought of a good title, and somehow it stuck...