The Surprisingly Juicy History of Lorem Ipsum
Before “lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” became the universal sound of empty text boxes, it had quite an intellectual origin. What we now use as simple placeholder copy actually started as serious philosophy — words from Cicero himself in the 1st century BC.
Back then, Cicero wrote a five-book treatise called De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”), exploring the boundaries between pleasure and virtue. The modern Lorem Ipsum that fills our Figma frames and HubSpot modules today is derived from parts of Liber Primus, the first book of that work. Over time, the original Latin was tweaked, scrambled, and stripped of meaning — turning deep Roman philosophy into beautiful nonsense.
The earliest known printed appearance of “Lorem ipsum” as we recognize it dates back to the 1914 Loeb Classical Library edition of De Finibus, where H. Rackham translated this passage:
“qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet consectetur adipisci velit…”
That fragment evolved into the familiar sentence every designer and developer has seen at least once:
“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.”
From Ancient Rome to Letraset Sheets
Fast-forward a couple of thousand years to the 1960s.
Before Google Fonts and Markdown editors, designers worked with Letraset — physical sheets of type that you could rub down onto paper.
Letraset popularized Lorem Ipsum as filler text for design mockups, giving art directors an easy way to visualize type hierarchy and composition before the copywriters even showed up. Their Body Type transfers were so widely used that “Lorem ipsum” quietly became the global language of layout.
The Desktop Publishing Era
In the 1980s, Adobe PageMaker (originally developed by Aldus) carried Lorem Ipsum into the digital world. PageMaker shipped with built-in templates containing the text, spreading it across the new frontier of desktop publishing.
From there, the phrase made its way into every mockup, wireframe, CMS theme, and now — into generators like our very own FreshJuice Lorem Ipsum Generator 🍊.
Why We Still Love It
Lorem Ipsum remains one of those design constants — a quiet companion that lets you focus on typography, rhythm, and layout before real content arrives. It’s a timeless bridge between ancient philosophy, mid-century print, and modern web design.
Kind of poetic when you think about it: a 2,000-year-old idea about pleasure and virtue still helps us ship beautiful interfaces today.
About this generator
This Lorem Ipsum generator uses a hand-picked Latin word list and a bit of math to create natural-looking filler text. Sentences and paragraphs are formed with random but realistic lengths, punctuated for rhythm, and always start with the classic "Lorem ipsum." The result is clean, readable placeholder text — perfect for design mockups, code demos, and content previews.