Lorem ipsum

About the dummy or placeholder text

Lorem ipsum is a meaningless Latin text, so-called dummy or placeholder text, which is used to estimate how a layout will look with text presented in a particular font. This is usually done by designers, but it is also needed for pseudo-localization.

This text became widely popular due to PageMaker, the predecessor of Adobe InDesign, where it was used as the default placeholder text.

Lorem ipsum is a distorted passage from Marcus Tullius Cicero's philosophical treatise called De finibus bonorum et malorum (“On the Limits of Good and Evil”). It was distorted to the point that individual words and even syllables were literally scratched out of the original: for example, in the original it is dolorem ipsum, and this is not even the beginning of a sentence.

There was an attempt to translate this text into English, but it still hardly makes any sense.

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The memoQ has a plugin that performs so-called pseudo-translation—that is, it fills the target with nonsense just to show what the text will look like.

Nowadays, you can generate any texts in any language using ChatGPT.