• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

“Pain Of Itself”: The Meaning Behind The “Lorem Ipsum” Placeholder Text

March 12, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

You’ve likely come across the Lorem Ipsum placeholder text at some point in your life. A typical passage, designed to be unintelligible, goes likes this:

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.

Advertisement

The placeholder text is used as an example when demonstrating screens displaying text, or as placeholder words in documents on your computer. Occasionally, people forget to remove the placeholder text, leading to such inventions as the Lorem Ipsum Dolor and Cheddar wrap.

ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.

The garbled text no longer has any meaning, but detective work by Classics professor Richard McClintock pointed out that it is a scrambled version of Cicero’s De finibus.

Advertisement

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.

A 1914 translation of this text, as reported by Slate, 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.

Essentially, the first part is a scrambled passage of Cicero that can be summarized as “no pain, no gain”.

Advertisement

It’s often claimed that the placeholder text dates back to an anonymous printer in the 1500s who scrambled a piece of Latin text as a way of demonstrating the quality of the print. However, further detective work by professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Versailles Philippe Cibois found that the source of the Lorum Ipsum placeholder text is likely from the 1914 translation, which also happens to begin a new page with the words “lorem ipsum”.

The placeholder text has been in use by newspapers in the UK since the 1960s, and perhaps has its origin at the UK company Letraset in 1959, but that’s far from the 1500s origin the Internet would have you believe.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. China Evergrande bonds suspended as prices slump
  2. At unfinished Evergrande apartments in central China, buyers seek answers
  3. Italy’s PD leader Letta seen winning Siena parliamentary seat – early count
  4. First Case Of Human Infection By Silverleaf Fungus That Usually Infects Trees

Source Link: "Pain Of Itself": The Meaning Behind The "Lorem Ipsum" Placeholder Text

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version