Talk:Lorem ipsum

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

Contents

[edit] Re: Cultural Impact

Maybe I just don't know the right college students, but I haven't heard "lorem ipsum", (or any typesetting slang, for that matter) used as a term for inebriation. Urban Dictionary doesn't have it either. Can the contributor come back and identify the college in here? 128.208.1.57 00:09, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

You can find out by clicking the history button and making random checks on the entries. The contributor was 66.68.111.139, (seach history for: 23:26, 1 October 2005 66.68.111.139 (→Cultural Impact)). IPs are to be distrusted, above all when they don't cite sources. I'll delete it until proven factual. --tickle me 03:52, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] div

16th century? Maybe not. Here is the Straight Dope's take on it. (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010216.html)

"Just one problem. When I spoke to McClintock recently, he said he'd been unable to locate the old type sample in which he thought he'd seen lorem ipsum. The earliest he could definitely trace back the passage was Letraset press-type sheets, which dated back only a few decades. But come on, you think graphic arts supply houses were hiring classics scholars in the 1960s? Well, maybe they were. But it's easier to believe that someone at Letraset simply copied the text from an old hot-type source. We're now faced with the mere technical detail of figuring out which one."

the full text is in the wikisources...where's the link?

Does this article really need that huge block of source text? RickK 03:54, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)

It is the entire traditional text, to be sure. Now that http://ps.wikipedia.org is online, perhaps it should be moved there. I would keep it somewhere in case anyone needs a lorem ipsum text. -- Smerdis of Tlön 05:09, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)


"pied"? -- The Anome 22:44, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Printer's pi is type that has been mixed together randomly. Not sure where it comes from, myself. -- Smerdis of Tlön 23:45, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I found some of this text on a web page and tried to translate it. This is what I started with:

Duis autem vel eum Iriure dolor.
In hendrerit.
In vulputate.
velit esse molestie consequat, 
vel illum dolore. 
eu. 
feugiat nulla facilisis, at vero eros et Accumsan
et iusto odio Dignissim. Qui blandit praesent, luptatum Zzril delenit Augue.
duis dolore te Feugait nulla facilisi.

And this is what came out:

Twice but even him I am hew/chop into shaped by Iriur.
Into the hendrerit.
In the vulputat.
They may wish to be annoying consequat,
even that by the pain. 
Bravo. 
The no feugiat easy, but truly the masters and Accumsan
and to the justice to the hatred. 
Which/who Digniss flatters the surety, mitigates the wolf of Zzrilus by Augu.
Twice by the pain you no Feugait easy.

Mangled Latin poetry. No suprise. Auric The Rad 22:33, Dec 10, 2003 (UTC)

[edit] huh?

does this work?

[edit] Homely Latin

Which/who Digniss flatters the surety, mitigates the wolf of Zzrilus by Augu.
Twice by the pain you no Feugait easy.


This short passage is used as filler material for web page designers, as well. An online search for Lorem Ipsum will turn up an incredible number of pages, if only in the page title tags. Using this snippet of Latin as filler is sometimes, confusingly, called Greeking. Greeking is often more often used to describe the replacement of tiny, unreadable fonts with grey boxes when you wish to view the overall layout of a document, instead of the actual text.

Which brings me full cicle, really, since the first application (that I know of) to do Greeking was Aldus PageMaker. Aldus's splash screen showed this Latin text in the background. A mangled version of this Latin text (which is from Cicero's de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum) is often used in publishing to test the form of a layout without being distracted by the content. Ironically, this process is called "greeking".

The version usually seen starts out "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet"... anything after that is pretty variable. Some even start out with "Lorum ipsum" instead.

The message in the original somehow reminds me of the movie Fight Club.

[edit] Origins & rediscovery

Web sites are in general agreement that Richard McClintock, Latin professor and Director of Publications at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia (re)-discovered the source of the Lorem Ipsum text and found it to be "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" [1], though none of Google's top hits mentioned that he published his finding in Before and After in 1994 [2], so I asked him and received this quick response:

Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2004 17:54:48 -0400
To: User:Ke4roh
From: Richard McClintock
Subject: Re: Lorem ipsum date
Hi, Dr. McClintock,
I've looked the web over for information about your discovery of the source of "Lorem ipsum," though nobody seems to note WHEN you made the discovery. If it's not too much trouble, what year was it? I'd like to include the information in the Wikipedia article <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum>.
Thanks,
Jim Scarborough
Dear Jim,
The letter about Lorem ipsum that started all the fuss was printed in Before & After, vol. 4 No. 1, in 1994. But I had looked up the passage a couple of years before that, for my own curiosity. Only when I saw them saying that it didn't mean anything did I take the trouble to tell the world.
Thanks for your interest.
Thank you.
Richard McClintock
Director of Publications
(434) 223-6395
P. O. Box 626
Hampden-Sydney College
Hampden-Sydney, VA 23943-0196

Here's the published note:

Lorem ipsum is Latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from Cicero's de Finibus 1.10.32, which begins "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..." [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]
What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printed in the 1500s took a galley of type and scambled it to make a type specemin book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occational 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. It's ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to me' and 'greeking' have common semantic roots! — Richard McClintock. Before & After vol. 4, no. 1, 1994.

(I don't have time to change this right now, but the current assertion that adding lorem ipsum is the same as greeking the text is incorrect. Greeking is when the text is rendered as grey block below a certain point size in modern layout programs. -- [inspiral])

One doesn't call a grey field where text should appear "greeking" just because it's a grey block of text. That just seems too unlikely to me: what possible reason could there be to call that "greeking" if you can call it "placeholder" ? No, there must a good reason "greeking" is used.
I think it's more likely that "greeking" originally meant substituting some form of nonsense text, or unreadable characters perhaps. Note that your assertion that the term is used only in "modern" programs is incorrect. I found the term in a Windows SDK from ten years back, meaning something like "to replace with random squigglies or grey lines".
Just never base you're opinion on the meaning of a word on the usage in computing or computer programs. Meanings are very often subtly (or less subtly) changed or extended. Shinobu 06:41, 31 August 2005 (UTC)


In my 2001 research of "lorem ipsum" text and I was made aware of the origins by Rick Pali who posted the complete article from Design magazine, Before and After in alt.fonts.faqs. Missing from the previous excerpts in the introductory paragraph. It doesn't seem as though that the "findings were published" but rather the article was simply an editorial piece:
After telling everyone that Lorem ipsum, the nonsensical text that comes with PageMaker, only looks like Latin but actually says nothing, I heard from Richard McClintock, publication director at the Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who had enlightening news:
Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from Cicero's 'de Finibus' 1.10.32, which begins 'Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...' [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]
What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printed in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occasional 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. It's ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to me' and 'greeking' have common semantic roots!'' - Discography 18:01, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "nothing at all"

Given that we now know where the original text came from and that it DOES mean something, despite the fact that is has been altered over time and includes some nonsense, why does the article still claim that it means "nothing at all"? --CloudSurfer 07:14, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

For current use of "lorem ipsum" it actually does mean nothing. It is not meant to have a meaning when used in design but rather has just the function of signifying content text and making a design seem 'complete'.--Discography 17:41, 21 Aug 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Note on the linguistic effect

I actually think that not only does it mean nothing at all, but because we want it to mean nothing as a placeholder, we actully make it mean nothing at all. If we had directly taken the words of Cicero, then we would be taking away from the beauty of the original piece.

68.98.187.239 12:58, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] SPAM vandal

Watch out, some IP-address keeps adding huge L-I blocks to this article and makes it unreadible! Thanx 69.142.2.68 18:53, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Apart from classical lipsum.com only value adding generators should be listed (choices of user setting, other languages/charsets, funny texts etc.) else the "external links" section will be constantly spammed. --Tickle me 00:23, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

There seems to be some disagreement over whether The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog should be in the See Also section. As a note to those for removing it, I think the rationale is that it is similar in that both are used as sample text. My two cents worth is that it is a slight stretch to include it, but that it is relevant enough that it helps the article more than it can hurt (through potential confusion). — Saxifrage ✎ 19:58, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree. I also think All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy should be included there too, as another iconic example of filler text. Ewlyahoocom 14:34, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
I would agree except that right now it's just a redirect to The Shining (film) and that article doesn't have any information about the phrase. — Saxifrage ✎ 00:07, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
It's a shame redirects don't support anchor tags, but there is this in section 1.4:

At the Overlook, Wendy grabs a baseball bat and goes searching for Jack down in the lounge. She walks to the typewriter, and sees the sheet in place. Written on it are endless repetitions of the single sentence "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." She looks through the stack of papers neatly placed to the side with increasing horror; the book Jack was working on consists of only the repetitions and permutations of layout of that same sentence.

Ewlyahoocom 01:06, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
It doesn't have any treatment about the phrase as filler text though, so linking to it would just confuse the reader who doesn't already know about it. Ideally, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy would be turned into an article about the phrase and whatever contemporary adoption as filler text its had. Failing that, though, it shouldn't be linked because it wouldn't make any sense to the reader. — Saxifrage ✎ 01:19, 26 April 2006 (UTC)


The text The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is not (or should not be) used as filler text... rather, the text has the benefit of displaying each single letter of the (English) latin alphabet. For designers it is possible to see the cut (style) of each single letter when set in a specific font. The relevancy here is that it is, just like lorem ipsum text, a tool however there is no other relation. — Discography 13:36, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Distribution of letters

The article says:

"Lorem ipsum" is also said to approximate a typical distribution of letters in English, which helps to shift the focus to presentation.

Unless this claim can be sourced, I suggest it should be cut as manifestly untrue. Latin has no w, y or z, and k is rare; the combinations th and sh in English mean many more ascenders. Because it is a highly inflected language, Latin sentences have fewer and longer words, which makes the distribution of spaces quite different. --Pfold 17:37, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

I believe you might be misunderstanding the meaning of "distribution of letters". Until I read your comment, I had always assumed that it was referring to the lengths of the words, and the average occurance of double letters. By "distribution of letters", it means that an average English sentence will likely have words of approximately the same distribution of how many letters each word is... yes, that's a very convoluted way of explaining it, but that's because the only way to make it more concise would be to simply repeat what the article already says. Here's the letter-length of the words in the first sentence in Lorem ipsum, including punctuation: 5 5 5 3 4, 10 11 4, 3 2 6 6 9 2 6 2 6 5 6. Aside from the absense of single-letter words, this "letter distribution" is fairly similar to an average English sentence.
I hope I didn't over-explain myself (or come off as a snotty know-it-all), I just wanted to make sure I was clear on how I percieved the term. - Ugliness Man 14:33, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
I too was somewhat confused by that phrase, although I also assumed that "distribution of letters" refered to the character distribution (ie the distribution of characters in relation to spaces and punctuation) rather than in the occurance of each letter in the alphabet distributed in the text. However Pfold's argument against it being a similar distribution of characters to spaces also seems to hold some merit. Using Ugliness' count of the lipsum text and counting the first 19 words of Ugliness' own post revealed similar numbers between the two with the lipsum being slightly higher (lipsum: 100 characters, 19 words, 5.26 char./word; Ugliness: 92 char., 19 words, 4.84 char/word). When using a larger sample set, however, the disparity between the two languages becomes more readily apparent: using the "complete" lipsum passage that the article links to yields an average of 6.81 char/word contrasted to the first 5 chapters of Genises (again Wikipedia's text, using the English translation of the Bible) which averaged only 4.10 char/word. That being said, lipsum still resembles English in terms of space usage and punctuation without giving the "reader" any semantic meanings (unless the reader diligently looks up where the lipsum phrase originated from). Indeed, the slight difference in characters per word (eg an increase of 1-3 char/word in lipsum for the sources I used) may reflect the relative ease between the documents; lipsum (using Flesch-Kincaid) had a grade level of 11, whereas the Bible text had a level of only 5.5. Thus a more astute sample text (perhaps a newpaper article, or an excerpt from Steven Hawking's "A Brief history of Time") may cause the average char/words to more approximate each other. Pyth007 13:58, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
I also wanted to add that the originators of the lipsum text probably did think that the text was a good approximation of character distribution and didn't bother to factor in the nuances between the word formation of the two languages. Thus when the article says "'Lorem ipsum' is also said to approximate..." I think that it is true; the original intent of and statement of reasonings for the lipsum text are true, reguardless of how accurate it actually is linguistically. Similarly, wearing shorts in the winter is said to cause the common cold, but any biologist will tell you that it's not the weather but rather viruses that causes one to get sick.Pyth007 14:16, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
Of course, there is a view that any supposed approximation to English is entirely irrelevant, and an post hoc justification. Until the 18th century much more was printed in Latin than in the native languages of Europe, and what is the evidence that it was first used by English typesetters? In any case, no typesetter would view a Latin text as an approximation to English - just look at any English/latin parallel text if you're not convinced by the linguistic arguments! McLintock's claim may be unsourced, but it seems entirely plausible, and no one has come up with anything better. I think the claim that it approximates to English either has to be sourced or deleted - unless we know "says" it's similar the satetment is of no value. --Pfold 18:43, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Originators of Lorem Ipsum

I think it's safe for me to say that the originators of 'lorem ipsum' and that small paragraph there would be (microsoft) frontpage.

This is the text the program would automatically generate for you in giving you template. The title of a paragraph usually read 'Lorem Ipsum'. This was one of the first programs - html related - that I used. Perhaps I am off. Evrenosogullari 05:43, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

If this is so, all this latin business is a large unneeded humbo jumbo of information that results from some programers at microsoft generating random text. I hope this is not so. Evrenosogullari 05:43, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
No, lorem ipsum has been around many, many years longer than Microsoft Corporation, let alone Frontpage. — Saxifrage ✎ 05:56, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
He just thinks this becuase it's the first place he saw it. Common mistake, it's human nature to assume the first place you saw it was the original. — SheeEttin {T/C} 16:49, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
Aldus Pagemaker (which was later part of the Adobe family) allowed "lorem ipsum" text to be used as a filler. Letraset sheets also had lorem ipsum text. — Discography 17:33, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Link to external loremipsum site

After reading the new comments regarding links to external lorem ipsum websites I propose the inclusion of the external link www.loremipsum.de

Why should this website be included?:
- www.loremipsum.de was the first ever dedicate website for lorem ipsum
- The content on loremipsum is either completly orginal or completly credited.
- Loremipsum.de does not contain "google advertising", requests for donations or other messages.

The website was launched in 2001 as a demonstration website used as a protype teaching students basic web design. The content was personally researched and credit has been given. Since this time it has become a popular site for designers seeking lorem ipsum text, either through the generator or as a downloadable text or word document.

Since 2001 other loremipsum websites have been also launched, some shamelessly copying orginal content (without permission or crediting the source). As a result loremipsum.de is now "copyleft", free to copy however credit is appreciated. — Discography 12:00, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't know about it being the first as 2001 is awfully young as far as the Web is concerned, but apart from that it does look like a very well–put together page. It seems to contain all the information that lipsum.com does without ads and with a nicer layout. I would support adding this link to the page. I'm going to offer the further suggestion for consideration that we also remove the lipsum.com link because we only need one link to a generator. — Saxifrage ✎ 19:02, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
Waybackmachine archive of loremipsum.de — lipsum.com came out later and was a single page whereas loremipsum.de contained historical info, downloads etc... — Discography 11:02, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

We've made a cool new lorem ipsum generator with a really simple layout and some handy buttons for making paragraphs shorter and longer. It's not a commercial venture, our design team coded it from scratch using AJAX because we couldn't get what we wanted from the other ones out there. You can have a look at http://www.e-cbd.com/lorem-ipsum-generator.htm — I realise there's an argument for only having one generator, but I think you could also argue that Wikipedia users would be better served by having links to a few different generators with added features — there's certainly room for more without it becoming a free-for-all. I won't add our link in, but I'll leave it up to the consensus of the discussion here if anyone thinks our generator is worthy. There's a link from the page to Wikipedia as well, not that it counts for anything, but I thought I'd at least mention that we're Wikipedia supporters as well. Cheers E-CBD 02:31, 13 October 2006 (UTC)E-CBD

As a note, Wikipedia isn't really in the business of providing users with a directory of resources, so a that particular argument for inclusion doesn't carry much persuasive weight here. Google and DMOZ are much better at providing resources, and we're not aiming to replace them.
(Quite aside, the generator doesn't seem to work in Firefox on MacOS X: the text box is blank and pushing the buttons doesn't do anything.) — Saxifrage ✎ 19:03, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

I guess I joined this discussion a bit late, but lipsum.com has the advantage that it doesn't need JavaScript to work, while www.loremipsum.de does. Bi 12:52, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Jasper Fforde

I just thought I'd point out that Lorem Ipsum is spoken as a language of one of the characters in Jasper Fforde's (http://www.jasperfforde.com/) series of "Thursday Next" novels.

I don't know if that should be mentioned on this page or not.

[edit] Sourcing

I've seen the source 'Before and After Magazine, volume 4, number 2' mentioned in at least 2 other relevant webpages, so if someone can get hold of it somehow we may be able to use it as a source for this article. --ais523 15:05, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

The content of the article has been printed in this discussion (under Origins & rediscovery) and I have had contact with Rick Pali who was the first person to refer (ie digital reprint) to the article by Richard McClintock in "Before and After" online in the newsgroup alt.fonts faqs. The article (or better called an editorial) is above and based on the information above (ie. dialogue with Richard McClintock) and general consensus about the origins, the article can be safely referenced. Discography 20:31, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lipsum

In the article new changes state lorem ipsum (or simply lipsum)... and following is continued reference to lipsum. This is new and I believe incorrect as Lorem Ipsum is not referred to as "lipsum" but rather by more common terms such as blind text / filler text / mock text / dummy text / greeked text / placeholder text. Although Lipsum happens to be the name of a website with lorem ipsum info, it is an obscure term and distorts the real information in the article. Discography 20:14, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../l/o/r/Talk%7ELorem_ipsum_4162.html"