This essay was adapted from Jack Shepherd’s newsletter, On Words and Up Words.
Lorem Ipsum is the nonsense dummy text commonly used by designers and typesetters to lay out a page before the real text arrives for the big show. It’s the textual equivalent of a stand-in on a movie set helping the gaffer to get the lighting right while actual movie star Christian Bale hangs out in the wings and screams abuse at them. (For anyone wondering, that was a joke that would have slayed in 2009, around the time I lost the ability to generate useful new pop-culture references.)
This doesn’t always work perfectly.
When I first encountered Lorem Ipsum, I was told that it was nonsense that looks a bit like Latin, which is certainly partially true!
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.
But the real secrets of its origin are revealed in its sixth word, consectetur, which happens to be the third-person singular present active subjunctive of the deponent Latin verb consector, which means “to pursue eagerly.” Helpfully, it’s a rare enough form that there aren’t many examples of it in the existing corpus of Latin, so it’s not hard to trace it back to its original context. Credit for figuring this out (some time in the ’90s) goes to Classics professor Richard McClintock, who sent in a correction to a magazine that had run an article defining Lorem Ipsum the same way it was originally explained to me: “It’s not Latin, though it looks like it, and it actually says nothing.” McClintock’s note indisputably pinpointed the source of Lorem Ipsum, but in the process introduced a red herring that has plagued almost everyone who’s written about it since.