Lorem Ipsum, or Lipsum for short, is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only four centuries, but now the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lipsum.

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English.

Contrary to popular belief, Lipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Sed sagittis purus quis nulla. Curabitur arcu erat, venenatis et, vehicula at, lobortis non, lacus. Nunc in metus vel odio suscipit consectetuer. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos. Suspendisse vel purus sit amet sapien ullamcorper sodales. Aliquam pulvinar mollis lectus. Nullam eu orci vitae augue eleifend vehicula. Sed sit amet diam. Nunc volutpat. Fusce sit amet purus. Proin augue risus, facilisis sed, dictum ac, tincidunt nec, leo. Aenean leo erat, vulputate vitae, laoreet vitae, imperdiet vitae, tellus. Ut mattis, risus non nonummy hendrerit, justo ligula dignissim massa, sit amet dapibus augue dui et mauris. Pellentesque vehicula mi nec leo. Cras egestas, neque vitae rutrum hendrerit, orci velit fringilla pede, in venenatis diam sem interdum lorem. In mollis metus. Maecenas nulla massa, hendrerit non, vehicula nec, accumsan non, elit. Nam lacus leo, egestas euismod, congue in, viverra quis, tortor.

Marcus Tullus Cicero was a Roman consul, orator, and writer. He foiled Catiline's conspiracy (63 BC) and was killed by Mark Antony's agents after he denounced Antony in the Philippics. His writings are regarded as a model of Latin prose. Formerly known in English as Tully.