Lorem History and Other Lorems

Although designers often refer to text produced with lorem ipsum content “greeking”, the words themselves are made of unreadable Latin. Since the 1500s, dummy text has been used by printers, typographers and writers to see how letters and words might look on a page. And the text isn’t purely random — it stems from a Latin text by Cicero from approximately the first century BCE.

Set to a typeface, words take on very different looks on a page, a website or an app. To this day, filler text like lorem ipsum helps designers, typographers and artists make decisions about specific typefaces, font sizes and weights, as well as page colour and placement of text.

Wikipedia has a decent entry on the history of lorem ipsum but an article at Priceonomics is better.

In no way is Lorem 2 the only lorem website or lorem tool. It may be the best out there (we are biased) but there are many others. Here is a list of a few other lorem-related sites and tools:

• The granddaddy of lorem ipsum generators Lorem Ipsum that has paragraph, word counts
• A beautifully designed Lorem Ipsum Generator that also has a bit of lorem history
• Adobe InDesign has its own lorem generator. In the menu at the top, just go to Type > Fill with Placeholder Text and you’ve got lorem
• A tiny and free Mac application called Littelpsum is quite cool

Thank you for stopping by Lorem 2!