Filler Text

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher and accomplished orator who was amputated and beheaded on the orders of Mark Antony for his scathing criticism and opposition against the man.

But before his hands and head were non-consensually separated from his body, he authored a work on ethics titled De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the ends of good and evil) in 45 BCE. "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..." is the English translation of an excerpt from that work. This work survives only because centuries later, the Church declared him to be a “Virtuous Pagan” and thus his writings were spared the fate of a lot of Roman-era literary works (they were banned and/or burnt).

In the 1500s, an unknown printer scrambled the words in the aforementioned phrase ("There is no one...") and that scrambled version survives to this day in a rather ubiquitous, yet mostly overlooked fashion.

Fast forward to the 1960s, a typeface manufacturer named Letraset started using the scrambled version of that excerpt from Cicero in their advertising campaigns, and in the 1980s, Aldus (which went on to become Adobe) used it in their Pagemaker Desktop Publishing Software.

The Latin original of “There is no one who loves pain itself…” is “Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...

If you haven't figured it out yet, this is the origin of the dummy filler text used by almost every designer

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur sapien ex, convallis a maximus eget, cursus ac risus. Mauris eu diam at justo interdum bibendum vitae eget urna. Suspendisse vel dolor accumsan, imperdiet urna iaculis, euismod justo. Nam vel libero blandit nisl accumsan pharetra eu vel leo. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Suspendisse et mattis tellus. Proin quis pulvinar lectus. Nunc ac quam elementum, euismod ante a, porta lectus. Integer mollis leo lectus. Etiam ut arcu ut felis pellentesque aliquam ac consequat ipsum.