Where Lorem Ipsum. Really Comes From.

The actual Cicero passage

The original starts: Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...

Translated by H. Rackham in 1914: "Nor is there anyone who loves, pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure."

Cicero's essay is a philosophical dialogue on the nature of good and evil. The passage argues that people don't suffer for its own sake — they endure suffering for a greater goal. A fine argument. Almost no designer has ever read it.

How it became placeholder text

The earliest known use of scrambled Cicero as placeholder dates to the 1500s, but the modern version traces back to a 1960s Letraset sheet — a commercial product showing dry-transfer typefaces. Letraset used Cicero because Latin was familiar enough in Europe to look like real text, and the letter frequencies roughly match modern European languages. By the time desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, lorem ipsum was the standard.

Aldus PageMaker included lorem ipsum as placeholder text in its templates. Microsoft Word followed. By the late 1990s, it was universal across every piece of layout software, baked into every template, and reproduced — slightly differently each time — across a generation of design tools.

The scrambling

Modern lorem ipsum generators produce text that looks like Cicero but isn't — the word order is randomized, some "words" are synthetic Latin that never existed. That's by design. You want text that looks real enough to fill a layout but nonsensical enough that nobody reads it. The scrambled Cicero passage became the canonical source for word stock; generators pull from that pool.