Lorem ipsum original text

The original Latin

This is the sentence from section 1.10.32 that the familiar opening comes from:

Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet consectetur adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.

Compare it with the placeholder version:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

"Dolorem" lost its first syllable, "quia" was dropped, "adipisci velit" became "adipiscing elit", and "eius modi tempora incidunt" became "eiusmod tempor incididunt". The rest of the common text keeps taking pieces from sections 32 and 33 in the same way: "ullamco laboris", "excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident" and "id est laborum" all come from Cicero's words, cut and reordered.

The English translation

H. Rackham translated De finibus for the Loeb Classical Library in 1914. His version of that sentence reads:

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.

In context, Cicero is presenting the Epicurean view of pleasure through the speaker Torquatus. The argument is that people should pursue pleasure rationally, and that pain is sometimes worth bearing for a greater good. Section 33 ends on the same idea: the wise man "rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains."

You can read Rackham's full translation of Book 1 on LacusCurtius, linked in the sources below.

Make the common version

The generator below starts on four sentences: the classic opening line followed by three random sentences built from the same word list.

How it became filler text

• 45 BC: Cicero writes De finibus over about six weeks in the summer.
• 1966: Letraset dry-transfer sheets with the text are first published, according to the sources Wikipedia cites. The sheets spread lorem ipsum through design studios in the late 1960s.
• 1994: Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden–Sydney College, publishes the link to Cicero in a letter to Before & After magazine. He found it by tracing "consectetur", a word that is rare in classical Latin.
• Desktop publishing and after: word processors, including Microsoft Word and Pages, adopt it. Word's =lorem() function still inserts it today.

According to Letraset designer Dave Farey, the text was supplied by the British librarian James Mosley. It replaced an older Cicero filler, "Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?", from his speeches against Catiline. Typography manuals had used that line since the 1730s.

The "since the 1500s" myth

Many websites say lorem ipsum has been the printing industry's dummy text "since the 1500s". The date comes from McClintock's 1994 letter. In a 2026 interview he said it had been a guess with no evidence behind it. The earliest use with good evidence is the Letraset sheets of the 1960s.

Why the Latin was scrambled is still not settled. One theory, from the Monotype typographer Dan Rhatigan, is that it was garbled on purpose so its letters would better match the letter frequencies of English, making it a better stand-in for real copy.