What to KnowLorem ipsum refers to placeholder text often used in publishing and graphic design to demonstrate the visual style of a document, webpage, or typeface. It is intended to serve as a sample, not to be read as meaningful sentences.
How to Use ‘Lorem Ipsum’
Relax, since unless you are working as a typographer or graphic designer you will probably not have to use lorem ipsum at all. It is essentially nonsense language that serves to show the visual style of a typeface, webpage, or document.
Although it is Latin, English speakers and writers don’t “use” lorem ipsum the way that we do other phrases from that language such as et cetera and ad nauseum as part of everyday communication. Lorem ipsum isn’t really a meaningful phrase, but rather a garbled fragment of a longer Latin text (which includes the clause “qui dolorem ipsum”) written by the Roman philosopher Cicero in the 1st century BCE.
Excerpts of this text—similarly broken and truncated, as in “lorem ipsum dolor sit amet”—have been used for the past 60 years or so as placeholders in design layouts and templates for websites and print publications. Why not cut and paste actual, understandable writing for this purpose, or even just random letters strung together? Well, either of those options runs the risk of distracting from or influencing the design process. The point of lorem ipsum is that it looks just realistic enough to work as a demonstration, yet signifies nothing.
