If you’ve ever seen an unfinished website or print layout, you’ve likely seen chunks of text that begin “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” This dummy text is simply a placeholder, so it’s not meant to mean anything. But why do we use that text specifically?

Few people know the true answer to that question, which led Emily Zhang, creator of the YouTube channel Rabbit Hole, to deep dive into the history of “Lorem ipsum.” As it turns out, what we thought we knew about it was largely wrong. Not only that, but Zhang’s investigation revealed a delightfully human story of oopsies, ah-has, and eh-close-enoughs that resulted in the mysterious Latin-ish placeholder text.

“What Lorem ipsum actually is,” Zhang said, “is a far stranger series of decisions that lived beyond anyone’s expectations to become the most famous nonsense text in the world, and an unsolved mystery.”

The mysteries of Lorem ipsum

First, let’s go over some common misperceptions and what we thought we knew that turned out to be wrong.

Many people assume “Lorem ipsum” text is Latin, and a lot of it is. But “lorem” itself is not a Latin word. And in many iterations of the text, letters that don’t even exist in Latin show up.

Those anomalies have led people to believe it’s simply a Latin form of gibberish, but that’s not really true, either. Another belief is that it originated with a typesetter in the 1500s. But that turned out to be an accidental misunderstanding based on a throwaway comment by an academic who never thought people would run with it.

Essentially, there’s been a lot of lore surrounding Lorem ipsum, but there’s never been a definitive history of it written. No academic papers on it exist. And no experts have fully explored questions like: Why is it kind of Latin but kind of not? Where did it originally come from and when? Who decided to use it in the first place?

'Lorem ipsum' refers........

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