The real origin of Lorem Ipsum

TL;DR: Through interviews with Latin professor Richard McClintock and deep archival digging, this video thoroughly traces the true origin of Lorem Ipsum—from Cicero’s *De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum* in 45 BC, to the truncated passage in the 1914 Rackham translation, to a four-page patchwork on 1966 Letraset sheets, finally digitized by Aldus PageMaker and popularized to this day. ## Introduction: The Ubiquitous “Nonsense” Text Today, you can see Lorem Ipsum on almost any design template, website, or label. It looks like Latin but is actually a jumble of words meant to let designers focus on layout rather than content. But its true identity is far more complex than “nonsense”—it’s a piece of classical literature accidentally scrambled, hiding a decades-long unsolved mystery. ## Richard McClintock’s Discovery: From “Gibberish” to Cicero In 1987, with the release of Aldus PageMaker 3.0, Lorem Ipsum was built into one of the earliest page layout software programs as placeholder text. When *Before & After* design magazine asked about its origin, the magazine’s response was: “Nonsense text.” But a letter from Virginia changed everything. The writer was Richard McClintock, a former Latin professor and publications director at Hampden-Sydney College. Recalling it in an interview: “As a graphic designer, I saw it all the time in layout programs. One day I noticed an unusual word—*consectetur*. It reminded me of a SAT word like *punctilious*. I looked it up in the dictionary and realized it wasn’t gibberish.” McClintock wrote to *Before & After*, pointing out that this was actually a passage from Cicero’s *De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum*, only poorly truncated. The magazine later published a correction titled *Lorem Oopsum*, citing McClintock’s fax. ## Cicero’s Original: A 2,000-Year-Old Source In the summer of 45 BC, the year before Caesar was assassinated, Cicero wrote *De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum*, comparing different schools of philosophy. The original text from Book 1, Chapter 10, Sections 32–33 translates to: “No one pursues or desires pain itself because it is painful.” The truncated fragment McClintock found was: “Neque porro quisquam est, qui do- lorem ipsum quia dolor sit, amet, consectetur, adipisci velit.” Note the hyphen in “do-” splitting “dolorem” into “do-” and “lorem”—which is exactly how Lorem Ipsum begins. The “-ng” ending (as in “ishing for its acquisition”) is an English feature not present in Latin; the “v” in the original “velit” was also removed, turning it into “elit.” In 2012, a Cambridge University Latin scholar tried to translate the classic Lorem Ipsum back into English, yielding something like: “Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it, let him pursue it, ishing for its acquisiendum.” —Chaotic, but it retains the core of “pain” (*dolor*). ## The Truth About the 16th-Century Legend: McClintock’s “Erroneous” Letter Almost every source about Lorem Ipsum says it came from a 16th-century anonymous printer who scrambled Cicero’s text to make a type specimen book. But McClintock admitted: “That’s what I wrote in the letter. I never intended to become the world’s expert; I only wanted to correct one thing, and instead that mistake has persisted for over thirty years.” The video host then confirms: McClintock initially relied on the then-popular story (a 16th-century printer), without rigorous verification. It wasn’t until later that he went back to the actual book—H. Rackham’s 1914 translation of *De Finibus*—and turned to page 36, where he saw the exact truncated line: “Neque porro quisquam est, qui do- lorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit.” That book, along with earlier 19th-century dictionaries (like an 1829 English dictionary and an 1887 German dictionary), all recorded the same fragment, but only the 1914 edition provided the complete page location. ## Letraset Dry-Transfer Sheets: The 1966 Patchwork Before the 1990s, designers used Letraset dry-transfer sheets to set type. Lorem Ipsum appeared on the sheets as placeholder text. Laura Perry, an early Aldus PageMaker employee, recalled: “I took a Letraset sheet and typed it one afternoon. I was worried about copyright infringement, so I introduced a bunch of typos. I never imagined it would last this long.” Her mis-typed version includes “nibh”, “zzril”, and an extra “E” in “consectetuer” – errors still visible in many templates today. ## Exact Trace: The 1966 Sheet Matched to Four Pages The video host purchased a 1966 Letraset sheet on eBay – the oldest known physical Lorem Ipsum example. By comparing it line by line, he discovered a striking pattern: - The Lorem Ipsum on the sheet repeats three times. The first two paragraphs match page 36 of the 1914 edition from top to bottom (“nos amice et nebevol”). - Then it jumps to page 56, starting with “molestias access potest” and ending with “etiam mag quod cuis”. - Next, it jumps to page 70, from “guae ad amicos pertineren” to “sempitern aut diuturning timer”. - Finally, it jumps to page 118, starting with “auam multa vitiose” and ending with “nullion diciud putialenim depra et non”. Additionally, the sheet mixes in Spanish “Es muy fuerte” and French “salar le grand” (derived from the Latin *Salmo salar* for salmon). The host speculates: “Someone flipped through every 20 pages or so, picked favorite passages, and pasted them together for fun.” This conclusively proves that all Lorem Ipsum originates from the same 1914 book, with page numbers in ascending order – exactly matching the text in Letraset catalogs from the 1950s to 1970s. ## Conclusion From Cicero to Rackham, from dictionary entries to Letraset sheets, and then to Aldus PageMaker’s digitization, Lorem Ipsum’s evolution is a series of accidents: a broken word, a Latin professor’s curiosity, a pedantic letter, an afternoon of typing errors – ultimately becoming the design world’s most famous placeholder. Holding the 1914 book page he borrowed from the library, McClintock remarked: “Can you imagine it would continue to spread like this? Absolutely impossible. Not in a hundred million years.” And now, it still lives in every website and template. Source: YouTube video: The real origin of Lorem Ipsum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL1PDqzqhM4)