An update on Lorum ipsum

Some time ago (here) I briefly explored the origins of Lorum ipsum, the dummy filler text used in lay-ups to allow us to focus on design.

However, Emily Zhang from the Rabbit Hole channel (2026) has really dug into the foundation story of this filler text, and had videoed and edited her results, putting it on the web for all of us to enjoy. If you haven't yet watched her video, I firmly recommend it! Watch Emily's story here:

To summarise what Emily has documented (Rabbit Hole, 2026): 

1. Cicero wrote a comparison of philosophies entitled "De finibus bonorum et malorum", roughly 2000 years ago. And, being Roman, wrote it in Latin.
   
   
2. Then, in 1914, a chap named H. Rackham published a version of Cicero's work, containing both the Latin original and Rackham's translation, as "About the Ends of Goods and Evils". And that book was purchased by many libraries around the world, including the copy I accessed via the Internet Archive, from the College Misericordia Library in Pennsylvania. Emeritus Professor Richard McClintock at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia had inadvertently started Emily on her search for the origins of Lorem ipsum by identifying Cicero as the basis for the Lorem ipsum text in a 'letter to the editor' of Before and After Magazine in 1994 (Cima, 2015). Emily shows us this letter in her video, as she interviews Prof McClintock.
   
   
3. Rolling the clock forward to 1966, and Letraset of London was already creating rub over transfers for design and craft use. In pre-computer days, having used Letraset myself, I am very familiar with the transfer process. Select your chosen letters in the font size and style you want, line them up on your page - usually with fine pencil lines - then rub something smooth over the transfer sheet for the lettering to now be on your page. Letraset was great if you wanted something fancy on a cover in those far off times when printing had to be done either on a commercial press, or by an artisan's hand. And if you were a design company and wanted to mock-up a layout? It would be WAY too costly to set up a press to run one copy, then change it because the customer wanted a different look. Letraset transfers allowed a lot of text to be laid up quickly.
   
   If we want people to concentrate on the design, we don't want them critiquing the text. We want something that looks like words, but doesn't suck us into editing when we should be considering visuals, layout, colour and branding. At Letraset, in "a marketing meeting sometime during 1966, publicity design manager Colin Orchard mentioned that a sheet of dummy text would be useful" and the head librarian at "the Saint Bride Printing Library, [...] James Mosley", had "devoted his professional life to the history and contemporary use of printing and typography [and considered, that as] Latin was the core for 90% of all Western languages", he should avoid the famous Cicero lines, instead using more obscure patches of Rackham's text for "Lorem ipsum" (Rabbit Hole, 2026, 20:30). The text came from pages 36, 56, 80 and 118, sections of Cicero's Latin text (from the Rackham, 1914 translation) - which is in the public domain - was Anglicised to a greater or lesser extent, and used as filler text by Letraset.
   
   
4. Then, when we moved to computers, Aldus - the forerunner of Adobe - were creating some design software, called Aldus PageMaker. Laura Perry of that company keyed in the "Lorem ipsum" text that she remembered from her design training, making several unique keying errors in the process, slightly varying computer Lorem Ipsum from the Rackham (1914) Letraset version (Rabbit Hole, 2026, 10:49). And thus we have modern filler text.

And now we know from whence Lorem Ipsum came. Thank you Emily for your marvellous detective work!

Sam

References:

Cima, R. (2015, March 13). The History of Lorem Ipsum. PricEconomics. https://priceonomics.com/the-history-of-lorem-ipsum/

Rabbit Hole. (2026, May 31). The Unsolved Mystery of Lorem Ipsum [video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/kL1PDqzqhM4

Rackham, H. (1914). Cicero: De finibus bonorum et malorum (About the Ends of Goods and Evils trans. from the Latin). William Heinemann. https://dn711208.ca.archive.org/0/items/cicerodefinibusb0000hrac/cicerodefinibusb0000hrac.pdf