Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar from Hampden-Sydney College, is credited with discovering the source behind
the ubiquitous filler text. In seeing a sample of lorem ipsum, his interest was piqued by consectetur—a genuine, albeit
rare, Latin word. Consulting a Latin dictionary led McClintock to a passage from De Finibus Bonorum etMalorum (“On
the Extremes of Good and Evil”), a first-century B.C. text from the Roman philosopher Cicero.

Until recently, the prevailing view assumed lorem ipsum was born as a nonsense text. “It’s not Latin, though it looks like it,
and it actually says nothing,” Before & After magazine answered a curious reader, “Its ‘words’ loosely approximate the
frequency with which letters occur in English, which is why at a glance it looks pretty real.”

The purpose of lorem ipsum is to create a natural looking block of text (sentence, paragraph, page, etc.) that doesn’t distract
from the layout. A practice not without controversy, laying out pages with meaningless filler text can be very useful when the
focus is meant to be on design, not content.