Lorem ipsum began as scrambled, nonsensical Latin derived from Cicero’s 1st-century BC text De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum.

Until recently, the prevailing view assumed lorem ipsum was born as a nonsense text. “It’s not Latin, though it looks like it, and it actually says nothing,”

Creation timelines for the standard lorem ipsum passage vary, with some citing the 15th century and others the 20th.

So how did the classical Latin become so incoherent? According to McClintock, a 15th century typesetter likely scrambled part of Cicero’s De Finibus in order to provide placeholder text to mockup various fonts for a type specimen book.

Lorem ipsum was purposefully designed to have no meaning, but appear like real text, making it the perfect placeholder.

Don’t bother typing “lorem ipsum” into Google translate. If you already tried, you may have gotten anything from “NATO” to “China”, depending on how you capitalized the letters.

Lorem ipsum was popularized in the 1960s with Letraset’s dry-transfer sheets, and later entered the digital world via Aldus PageMaker.