Lorem Ipsum – the Dummies Guide to Dummy Text

If you work in design or printing (or with designers or printers) you will often see some pretty weird-looking text in documents, advertisements, posters and other design work. Here follows the full story (this may be helpful in a game of Trivial Pursuit).

In this post:

1. Latin
2. In Microsoft Word
3. In the Wild

1. Latin

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

De finibus bonorum et malorum, Cicero

Lorem ipsum is typically a corrupted version of De finibus bonorum et malorum, an ancient text by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero. The translation by H. Rackham reads as follows:

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

The text is used as “placeholder”, or “dummy” text when a document, pamphlet, print advert or similar is being designed and the actual copy has not yet been written.

2. In Microsoft Word

This is such common practice that Microsoft Word even introduced a function to generate Lorem Ipsum text!

1. Type the following in a new paragraph in a Microsoft Word document: =lorem()
2. Press the enter key and the “command” will be replaced by the standard Lorem Ipsum text.
3. Supplying a number between the brackets will result in that many paragraphs of text, eg.
   =lorem(25)
   results in 25 paragraphs of text

Most of your Phase 1 PAT Word report will have quite a number of headings with nothing underneath them — why not show off and use this dummy text as placeholder text to create a fully styled document in the meantime? This is also an extremely valuable tip for Grade 11 & 12’s busy with their websites. This will also allow you to polish up your formatting.

3. “In the wild”

From time to time you will actually come across this text “in the wild” where a designer has used placeholder text which has not later in the design process been replaced with the actual final copy.

References:

1. Lorem ipsum. (2023, January 11). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum