A 2,000-year-old text, rediscovered
Lorem Ipsum is not random gibberish. Its roots reach back to De finibus bonorum et malorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”), a treatise on ethics written by the Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero in 45 BC. The familiar fragment beginning “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” is a garbled excerpt from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of that work.
From a Renaissance type specimen to the web
The text entered design history in the 1500s, when an unknown printer scrambled a galley of Cicero's Latin to create a type specimen book. Because the words were unfamiliar yet shaped like normal language, readers could judge the look of a typeface without being distracted by meaning. It survived five centuries of typesetting essentially unchanged.
In the 1960s, Letraset popularised Lorem Ipsum by including it on dry-transfer sheets used by graphic designers. In the 1980s, Aldus bundled it with PageMaker, and it became the default placeholder text of desktop publishing, and later, the web.
Why designers still use it
Lorem Ipsum has a roughly normal distribution of letters and word lengths, so a paragraph looks like real prose. That lets designers, developers, and writers evaluate layout, typography, and rhythm without the content itself fighting for attention. Plain English placeholders (“Your headline here”) pull readers into reading; Lorem Ipsum lets the eye see the shape of the page.
When to use something else
For accessibility reviews, content audits, or stakeholder demos where people will actually read, switch to representative copy. Lorem Ipsum is for the visual draft, once meaning matters, real words win.