“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.” The purpose of lorem ipsum is to create a natural looking block of text (sentence, paragraph, page, etc.) that doesn’t distract from the layout. A practice not without controversy, laying out pages with meaningless filler text can be very useful when the focus is meant to be on design, not content. The passage experienced a surge in popularity during the 1960s when Letraset used it on their dry-transfer sheets, and again during the 90s as desktop publishers bundled the text with their software. Today it’s seen all around the web; on templates, websites, and stock designs. Use our generator to get your own, or read on for the authoritative history of lorem ipsum.

Lorem ipsum was conceived as filler text, formatted in a certain way to enable the presentation of graphic elements in documents, without the need for formal copy. Using Lorem Ipsum allows designers to put together layouts and the form of the content before the content has been created, giving the design and production process more freedom. It is widely believed that the history of Lorem Ipsum originates with Cicero in the 1st Century BC and his text De Finibus bonorum et malorum. This philosophical work, also known as On the Ends of Good and Evil, was split into five books. The Lorem Ipsum we know today is derived from parts of the first book Liber Primus and its discussion on hedonism, the words of which had been altered, added and removed to make it nonsensical and improper Latin. It is not known exactly when the text gained its current traditional form. However references to the phrase “lorem ipsum” can be found in the 1914 Loeb Classical Library Edition of the De Finibus in sections 32 and 33.