Lorem Ipsum is standard dummy text, or placeholder text, used to visualize what text would look like, such as font, typography and layout. It is easier to identify visual aspects using lorem ipsum as opposed to writing "content here" or other filler text. For those of you who don't know what Lorem Ipsum looks like or have never seen it before, here it is:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Fusce tristique felis quis quam dignissim quis vehicula velit gravida. Pellentesque magna leo, sagittis ac cursus vitae, faucibus ac neque. Aenean sed consectetur mauris. Vivamus venenatis quam ut magna aliquam sit amet porttitor mi pellentesque. Ut in dui dui. Proin in eros eu sapien lobortis gravida sit amet id lectus. Donec suscipit ultricies leo sed adipiscing. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Sed quis velit diam, a volutpat massa. Suspendisse non dolor eget metus ultrices vehicula. Aenean tincidunt ligula id eros aliquet ac aliquam neque malesuada. Curabitur porttitor tellus turpis, et adipiscing mi. Pellentesque eget augue et mi aliquet tincidunt in blandit nibh.

At a quick glance it looks like real text and you can get an authentic feel for the website, article, book or anything containing text. It is not until you actually look closer do you realize that it appears to make no sense. The text though does actually have an origin and has been used since the 1500s. According to lipsum.com:

Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old.

Read more about lorem ipsum at lipsum.com

Lorem Ipsum comes from passages of a latin book written in 45 BC by Cicero "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" translated to "The Extremes of Good and Evil".

Here is an example of where Lorem Ipsum would be used:

As you can see, although, you may not have the content ready for your site or whatever it is that you want to publish you can get a feel for what it would look like.

I hope Cicero is happy to know that we felt his text was so good that we now use it to fill up bank pages everywhere, or maybe that was just what he was going for? If so, kudos to you Cicero.

picture from wikipedia