What is Lorem Ipsum anyway?
Ajith | Jul 2009 | Miscellaneous
Most of you must have seen a dummy text block starting with the words ‘Lorem ipsum‘ in many blog theme demo sites (e.g. WP ThemeDesigner demo). Have you ever wondered what exactly Lorem Ipsum is?
Lorem Ipsum
Contrary to the common belief, Lorem ipsum is not exactly related to blog themes or web content alone. In fact, the history of ’standardized’ lorem ipsum goes back to the 16th century where print setting on traditional printers had to be done with some filler text. What some of the smart people did then was to take some Latin literature, omit certain words or even letters from some Latin words and add new letters to form completely junk text that did not make any sense. So basically Lorem ipsum means some non-sense text that does not have any contextual meaning.
It seems, some form of junk text was already in use even before the standard usage of Lorem ipsum came into practice. Remember that the Chinese invented the printing machine in 6th century and there is no reason why they wouldn’t have used ‘junk text’ then for type setting.
Common usage of Lorem ipsum and why junk text?
In publishing and graphics industry, Lorem ipsum is widely used to demonstrate the fonts, layout and other visual aspects of a document. The idea behind using the junk text is to make the consumer feel the quality, type face, size, color and other artefacts of the printed material rather than get him distracted by any readable material. Properly generated Lorem ipsum also guarantees normal distribution of text in a layout.
On the web, Lorem ipsum is used for demo sites, blog themes, test sites etc.
Where can you get Lorem ipsum?
There are several lorem ipsum generators available on the web (e.g lipsum generator). There are also several free downloadable software such as the one I found in Google code repository
Aliquam erat volutpat vel!
I wanted to say ‘Have a good one!’, but the Lipsum generator thought otherwise 
I’ve always wondered. Thanks for clearing it up.
moserw´s last blog post… Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince Movie Review! Pottermania Is Back And It’s Big…
every time i use blog theme i dont get it what is lorem ispum.
now it is clear.
rahul´s last blog post… Start Earning Extra Cash Daily
Thanks dear now i came to know the real meaning
You can generate Lorem Ipsum using MS Word – Details here – http://u.nu/97sk
Arun Basil Lal´s last blog post… Optimizing Images For the Web
[...] Most of you must have seen a dummy text block starting with the words ‘ Lorem ipsum ‘ in many blog theme demo sites (e.g. WP ThemeDesigner demo ). Have you ever wondered what exactly Lorem Ipsum is See the original post: What is Lorem Ipsum anyway? [...]
Thanks for solving the mystery
… i always used to wonder when i used to see this text on new blogs… Since it did not matter too much, i actually chose to forget about it
Cheers
Sandeep
Curious Little Person´s last blog post… Starting An Online Business Series: Researching and Finding our Market
“‘Aliquam erat volutpat vel”"
Is that a black magic spell?
Do take care everyone when saying this. Who knows.. you might be summoning a demon with this sentence lol.
Kurt Avish´s last blog post… Slipknot Masks Meaning – Slipknot Unleashed!
lol! Are you mentioning “Harry Potter”?
Anyway, I just got to know what is lorem ipsum’s meaning as I always saw this sentences in demo themes. Very interesting.
Regards,
Lee
Make Money Online´s last blog post… Poll : How Many Blog Do You Own And Manage?
not long before you find it in Oxford dictionary
Very good out-of-the-box thinking to write this article. Everybody sees this on all the templates. But you went one-step ahead and wrote a blog post about what it is. Kudos to your thinking.
Anyway, for those who are interested in additional information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum
Ramesh Natarajan´s last blog post… 15 Awesome Gmail Tips and Tricks
@Rajiv, @Rahul, @Mohan, Glad to know that this post was helpful.
@Arun, thanks for the Word Lipsum generator. I could not test it as I still have only Word 2003. It’s available from 2007 version onwards.
@Sandeep, we tend to forget many such things right? I was just Googling to understand what it is and hence wrote the post.
@Kurt, @Lee, LOL
@Raju, is it already a dictionary item by any chance?
@Ramesh, thanks… In fact, wikpedia was also referred by me
though I did not want to elaborate too much on it. I like writing very small posts so…
Thank Goodness! Its not!! Though its mentioned in Urban Dictionary already!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Lorem%20Ipsum
I use one of the generators when I working a new site that doesn’t have any posts yet – something needs to go there to test what it is going to look like.
So we have a real lore ipsum user here
Which generator are you using Kim?
Hmm.
i thought there is some meaning in some European language.
Now i know it is junk characters…
Every day I use a huge amount of Lorem Ipsum texts in my graphical designs and I usually generate them with an online (non-desktop) application: http://loregen.com/ I think that’s a great tool!!
Congratulations, this is a great article too!!
Look at: http://www.lorem-ipsum-generator.de/
Greetz Rom