There is an idiom in English, Greek to me, that is used to express that something is difficult to understand.
From this idiom comes a practice called Greeking, which meanschanging texts or symbols into something that can’t be understood.
Now, any content publishing has two primary components: design and text.
Greeking in content publishing is used to create dummy text because it prevents designers from getting distracted.
It also helps copywriters (people who work on the text) avoid mistaking the dummy text as final text.
Lorem Ipsum is dummy text and it is nonsensical i.e. it doesn’t mean anything and is a typical example of Greeking.
Dummy text has been in use since the invention of printing press in the 1440s and Lorem Ipsum is a version of the text that was used in 1500s (though it became popular in 1980s when computer publishing came in).
Researchers found Lorem Ipusm to be jumbled text from the first book of the Latin book-series De Fibinus Bonorum et Malorum (translates to ‘The Ends of Good & Evil’).
This book-series was written in 45 BC by Roman philosopher Marcus Tulles Cicero and became very popular in the period 1300-1600, when Europe was making a transition to modernity and witnessing extraordinary work in the field of culture, philosophy, politics, economics and art.
The selection of this text over any other text is believed to have happened by coincidence.
Research found that a typesetter who was required to make a book specimen would have coincidentally used Cicero’s work (the probability of this was anyway quite high because it was the most published work at the time).
And it is also believed that the typesetter only would have jumbled the text so as not to distract himself.
The particular phrase that Lorem Ipsum comes from was Dolorem Ipsum, which means “pain itself”; the complete sentence was as given below:
‘Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit…’ [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]
