“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua…” is not a mysterious spell nor a fragment of Latin poetry. It’s merely an excerpt from a sample of “dummy” text, of which variations can be found aplenty online.
In the 1500s, an unknown printer used a set of words to demonstrate fonts in his book. After that, the fictitious text became standard and widely used among designers, programmers, and copywriters.
What will be discussed?
- What does the phrase Lorem Ipsum mean?
- How to obtain Lorem Ipsum text?
- Lorem Ipsum generators
- Can Lorem Ipsum be used for free?
- How does the use of Lorem Ipsum affect SEO?
- Conclusions
The phrase “Lorem ipsum”, used in modern web design along with random phrases, is part of the phrase “dolorem ipsum”, which translates as “pain itself”. It comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero’s treatise “On the Ends of Good and Evil,” written in 45 BC.
“Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem”.
The famous text mentioning “Lorem Ipsum” translates into Ukrainian as follows:
“But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born, and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor is there anyone who loves, pursues, or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.”
Translation by H. Rackham, 1914.
Thus, the excerpt from which the two world-famous words are taken looks like this: “…dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet…”, which translates as: “…pain itself…” or “…pain itself, because it is pain…”.
Most “Lorem Ipsum” generators are free to use. To create text, you need to specify the number of paragraphs, then press the “Create” or “Generate” button, wait a few seconds, and copy or download the file.
You can also write “Lorem Ipsum” in PowerPoint using the auto-fill function. To do this, launch the program and write the formula where the text is intended:
= lorem(N), where N is the desired number of paragraphs.
📌 Read in blog post: Evergreen content
The history of the text’s origin and popularization
Many still believe that the text used to temporarily fill the space for content on websites is random, but this is not entirely accurate. The history of the phrase’s origin was determined by Richard McClintock, a professor of Latin at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He found the obscure Latin word “consectetur” in the “Lorem Ipsum” passage, researched quotations from classical literature mentioning this word, and thus discovered the source.
It is believed that printers in the 16th century were the first to use a fragment from Cicero’s text. The fragment became a standard in the printing industry to demonstrate font examples and texts. However, no samples of those materials have survived.
The story of the text’s popularity began in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets, which produced sheets of fonts. Individual letters were cut out from these to transfer them to various layouts, posters, etc.
Later, the publishing program Aldus PageMaker used “Lorem Ipsum” as a template text. The company merged with Adobe Systems Corporation. The release of the flagship software Aldus PageMaker in 1985 led to the popularization of the Latin phrase.
But how did the words “Dolorem ipsum” transform into “Lorem Ipsum”? Likely, this occurred in 1914 when the Loeb Classical Library published Cicero’s treatise with a characteristic carryover.
Page 34 of the book ended with the fragment “do-“, and page 35 began with “lorem ipsum”.
Why specifically Lorem Ipsum?
In various languages, there are alternative text options for temporarily filling free space on web pages. They are used by designers to select fonts and demonstrate them to the client—the website owner, presentation, or other product for which the design is being created.
“From the perspective of the convenience of perceiving printed texts, Lorem ipsum demonstrates that Latin script is most aptly adapted for writing works specifically in Latin (this considers the frequency of usage of characters with extending elements, such as g, l, h, p).” Wikipedia
On the websites of web studios and advertising agencies, you can find examples of other phrases that are convenient for assessing the readability of the text.
Such sentences are called pangrams. These are phrases or texts in which all or almost all the letters of the alphabet are present. “Lorem Ipsum” is the oldest and one of the most famous pangrams.
“A pangram is a phrase, expression, or text that contains every letter of the alphabet. Typically, pangrams are used to test the appearance of typefaces, the correctness of message transmission, and printing devices”. Wikipedia
Pangrams are often used in editorial, graphic, and web design. They temporarily replace the final text so that potential users can evaluate how the result will look. In the process of reviewing the design, the meaning of the text will not distract from the visual material if it’s “Lorem Ipsum.”
On the Microsoft Support website, you can find an explanation for the popularity of this particular fragment from the Latin treatise: “The phrase has been used by printers for centuries to demonstrate the most important features of their fonts. It was used because the characters make up complex inter-character spaces and combinations of character pairs, which best demonstrate the advantages of the given typeface“.
In the process of familiarizing with the page layout, the reader gets distracted from its design to the content of the written. To avoid this, specialists use standard text, universal for all websites and printed materials. Such templates are used by web developers to test the appearance of HTML templates.
“Before the advent of electronic publishing, designers improvised in working on layouts, depicting text with wavy lines. With the appearance of self-adhesive stickers with the printed text ‘Lorem ipsum,’ a more realistic way of indicating the placement of text on the page emerged.” From the description of the text “Lorem Ipsum dolor sit amet” on the Microsoft Support.
A set of various letters allows seeing how many lines fit on a page, to evaluate how harmoniously a specific font fits into the overall appearance of a website page, flyer, poster, etc.
How to get Lorem Ipsum text?
The simplest method for quickly creating “dummy text” is to use online generators. These tools allow creating unique text templates that always incorporate the well-known Latin phrase. Thanks to such services, there’s no need to manually enter or copy words from external websites. In some cases, you can get somewhat humorous texts, but the optimal option is when the content of the “Lorem Ipsum” text is neutral and unique.
Lorem Ipsum generators
Blind Text Generator
A universal generator that, in addition to the classic Latin pangram, generates other text fragments. To be original even in their drafts, specialists can use excerpts from Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” or Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”.
Website Planet
A Ukrainian-language web resource with a user-friendly interface allows downloading the result in RTF and HTML formats.
Lorem Ipsum
On the professional generator website, there are options for selecting the language and encoding, inserting specific letters that occur in certain languages. You can save the generated text in HTML and TXT formats.
Lipsum
Here you can learn about the history of the creation and the modernization of ways to use pangrams.
Lorem Ipsum Generator
A similar online service that allows you to quickly and freely generate template text.
GroupDocs
A similar online service can also be found among the solutions of a desktop software suite for viewing, commenting, comparing, converting documents, and more.
Cupcake Ipsum
Probably the most vivid and extraordinary generator. If you need to be serious, you can create a standard dummy text. However, if there is an opportunity and desire to make a joke, check the boxes next to “START WITH ‘CUPCAKE IPSUM DOLOR SIT AMET'” and “GIVE YOUR TEXT SOME ‘LOVE'”.
Then the service will provide you with a humorous text that resembles the classic, yet includes a multitude of sweet names: “Lollipop gummy bears powder caramel jelly gummy bears gummy bears gummy bears”.
Lorem Ipsum Generator (Default Text)
You can create random Latin text using a special extension installed on the Google Chrome browser. In the Chrome Web Store, you can find several solutions from different developers, for example, Lorem Ipsum Generator (Default Text). Each sentence is generated randomly, visually mimicking a full-fledged meaningful text. The user can customize the number and size of paragraphs, line breaks, etc.
The ability to insert a template of the well-known text of the required size is also available in Microsoft Word, as mentioned on the Wikipedia page:
“In Microsoft Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 (and in later versions), there is a lorem function (=lorem(parameter1,parameter2), where parameter1 is the number of paragraphs, parameter2 is the number of sentences per paragraph). For example, typing =lorem(2,7) (and pressing Enter) will generate text in the document”.
Content Marketer’s Comment
Dummy texts were very popular in the past: at that time, a website could be made by essentially one person, who was the designer, responsible for both frontend and backend, in other words, a one-man band. Nowadays, websites are hardly ever made single-handedly: the team includes several people, and usually among them are copywriters, so writing a dummy text on the required topic with the necessary keywords is not a problem. Chat GPT can handle this task splendidly as well.
The case is different with banner design, where lorem ipsum comes in handy.
How does the use of Lorem Ipsum affect SEO?
If you enter the query “lorem ipsum” in Google search, you will see many informational materials about the expression itself, as well as pages on web resources that are in the development stage. Sometimes these are individual pages of online stores that have not yet been filled with content due to the absence of certain products in the catalog. It also often happens that someone creates a website and neglects it, having closed (or never started) the business.
Text in a website template should be replaced with unique and topic-relevant content. Otherwise, search engines will consider the content irrelevant. To search for pages with “Lorem Ipsum” on a website, you can use the Serpstat service. During the development of a web resource, pages with template content should be closed from indexing. And before launching the site and, especially, its promotion, it’s important to check whether any pages still contain the Latin “dummy text”. This will help you prevent the page from being demoted in search engine results.
SEO Expert Comment
Dummy text can be confidently placed on the site and not closed from indexing.
If the site is already on the domain, this means that the team developing it has made at least preparatory actions: added buttons, menus, necessary pages or blocks on pages, illustrations, etc. And it turns out that the remaining task for the content manager is to fill in the text.
Formally, if it’s a working site and it has lorem ipsum, you can even leave it open to indexing: let it be indexed with this test content. After all, content is a component of the site with CSS: text is only about 20-30% of the content seen by search engines.
If you need to accelerate indexing, you can send all pages to Google Search Console for re-scanning by the bot, and then Google will see that the content on the site has increased and that work is being done on the site—this is better than keeping it in limbo for a few weeks and marinating it closed from indexing, and then “rolling out” zero and waiting for traffic.
Conclusions
- “Lorem Ipsum” is a classic pangram used for editorial, graphic, and web design. It temporarily replaces text content to assess the visual of a finished page.
- The phrase originates from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero’s treatise “On the Ends of Good and Evil”, written in 45 BC. Although it is believed to have been first used by an unknown printer in the 16th century, only samples of materials with the printed text “Lorem Ipsum” from the Aldus PageMaker publishing program (1900s) have survived.
- A large number of modern generators of Latin “dummy text” are known. Also, the lorem function is available in versions of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint from 2007. “Lorem Ipsum” text can be obtained for free, but it’s important to remember the need to replace it with unique and relevant text before launching the site. Otherwise, the pangram may not positively affect SEO.
