All language subtitles for The Unsolved Mystery of Lorem Ipsum

Why are these strange words everywhere?

Oh, did you think it was Latin?

What if I told you
Lorem wasn't a part of any language?

Okay, so it's just nonsense

words made to look like Latin.

But no, ipsum IS Latin. It means ‘itself’.

So is dolor sit amet.

It means [because it’s] ‘pain he loves’.

What Lorem ipsum actually is,

is a far stranger series of decisions
that lived beyond anyone's expectations

to become the most famous nonsense
text in the world.

And, an unsolved mystery.

It starts with one man.

I'm off to Virginia to meet him.

So here's the situation.

Today, Lorem ipsum is filler
text used in websites, labels, templates,

basically anywhere words need to go.

The point is that it's English-
looking nonsense

so people don't get distracted
by the meaning of the words

and can just focus on the design.

And it pops up everywhere.

But this is only the end of the timeline.

We can at least trace it to 1987. With
the rise of Macs and personal computers,

one of the first text programs
to use actual paper page formatting

was Aldus Pagemaker.

And its third version had this strange
filler text for all to use.

Of course, most people thought it was
meaningless text. It’s designed to be.

But when someone asks
Before & After design magazine about it

and they give that reply,
a mysterious man writes back.

No, everyone is wrong.

Lorem ipsum IS Latin, slightly jumbled,

the remnants of a passage from Cicero's
De Finibus, a book from 2,000 years ago.

His name is Richard McClintock,
and he's a former Latin

professor and publications
director at Hampden-Sydney College.

Which is exactly where we're headed.

Dr. McClintock?
- Hello.

Hello.

I brought you a rose off of
our rose bush.

Oh, thank you so much.
- You’re welcome.

It’s beautiful. It's so nice to meet you.
- Good to meet you.

Where did you see
Lorem ipsum in that first instance?

Well, as a graphic designer,
I saw it a lot in the layout programs

that we used to make the publications
for Hampden-Sydney.

I was looking at it one day

and realized it didn't look as though
it was entirely gibberish.

There was this unusual word consectetur.

Do you have like an English word analogy?

Like how rare is it?

It's the kind of word that they would-

you would put on an SAT exam.

Like punctilious.
- That sort of thing, yes ma’am.

I looked it up in the dictionary.

No...
- I do see consecta-

Oh, that's. You're right.

Thank you.
Glad somebody’s paying attention.

To pursue eagerly, to strive after,
endeavor to gain,

Neque quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum,

quia dolor sit, amet, consectetur,
adipisci velit.

Cicero De Fin 1.10.32.

Then somebody writes in to
Before & After,

someone wrote in,

I'm curious as to the Latin that you have
hidden in some of your articles.

It usually says Lorem ipsum dolor.
And the editor of the magazine

said basically it was just gibberish.

And I said, he's not right about that.

And so of course I wrote him a letter
and told him that it was

in fact an excerpt from Cicero's
De finibus bonorum et malorum.

So you just wrote in thinking no one
would care except this magazine and you

who had corrected them.
- Right.

I just did it as a pedant, you know...

But it just- it took off,

it was insane.

So now we have some origins.

In the summer of 45
BCE, a year before Caesar is killed,

Cicero writes De finibus bonorum et malorum,

comparing pros and cons
of popular philosophies.

Now, the book itself isn't that notable.

Had you read it before? I had not.
- Oh, okay.

I have still actually not read the entire thing.

Oh! It sounds like it's not compelling reading.

Still, as one of the most famous writers
in history, arguably

responsible for the Renaissance,
the Enlightenment, and our enduring love

for the Roman Empire, it's
no surprise we've saved many Cicero

works over the past 2000 years.

But immediately there are complications.

Lorem ipsum was not just copied down.

The passage Richard found is Book 1,
Chapter 10, Sections 32 to 33.

The ‘-ng’ is a big change because that's
an English thing and not a Latin thing.

You would never see a word
ending with ‘-ng’ in Latin.

No, and they took the V off

‘velit’, which so it means-

it doesn’t mean ‘he wishes’ anymore,

it just means elit.

To demonstrate just how
messed up it is,

the English translation of Cicero's
original sentence reads:

Nor is there anyone who pursues or desires

to obtain pain itself, simply
because it is pain.

In 2012, a Latin scholar
at the University of Cambridge

attempted to translate Lorem ipsum
into English and got:

Rrow itself, let it be sorrow;

let him love it, let him pursue it,
ishing for its acquisitiendum.

(Auto subbing didn’t stand a chance.)

But even if Lorem ipsum’s been tampered
with, at least we have its origin.

Before & After magazine
publishes a correction,

Lorem Oopsum, and quotes Richard's fax.

Lorem ipsum is Latin.

What I find remarkable
is that this text has been the industry’s

standard dummy text
ever since some printer in the 1500s

took it a galley of type and scrambled it
to make a type specimen book.

This is the narrative now repeated
by almost every source on Lorem ipsum.

The narrative.

See, I thought this video would be my usual
process.

Research, talk to experts, report back.

But soon I realized all the Lorem
ipsum websites were wrong.

And then I realized a complete history
of Lorem Ipsum doesn't exist.

There is no paper. There is no expert.

It's on page 34 of a book that no one
in their right mind would actually open.

So where on earth did they find it?

If you can dig out something definitive,
this story could get so much traction.

And that's when this went from me

making a video to me
conducting a full research investigation.

Let's start here.

Every source I see on Lorem ipsum says
- Has that same

It was invented in the 1500s.
- remote error.

Every result you click on, on

Google says with great confidence

it was invented by an anonymous typesetter
in the 1500s.

Yes. And that's all my fault.

Oh, no!

You were
writing in because you're specifically

trying to correct Lorem ipsum,
and then you just added that-

Yes.
- Added that in.

I actually never set out to become
the world expert on this subject.

I just wanted things to be right.

And this is all kind of happened
around me.

Kind of like the person
in Charlie Brown

who had a cloud over his head
everywhere he went.

And here I am, making the cloud
a rainstorm above your head.

Well, you definitely correct for that
fault because of what you discover next.

It was only later
when I went back to the book to look at it

and physically turned the page,
that all of a sudden it clicked

that it was that particular page
and not any just regular text.

Shall we go see the book itself?
- Okay.

I'd love to see. And was it
in this library that-

It was in this library.
- Wow.

And this very copy of the book.

H. Rackham, M.A.

Published in 1914.

Neque porro quisquam est qui do-

which it splits the word.

And then there is a page which starts off

Lorem ipsum quia dolor
sit amet,

consectetur, adipisci velit.

That's incredible.

So with your discovery of the 1914
Rackham book,

I decided to go on my own discovery
because I wanted to double

and just triple check that
Lorem ipsum had not existed before then.

I actually was able
to find dictionaries

that actually have a dolorem ipsum
cutoff as well, from the 1800s.

So this English one is from 1829.

If you look under their definition
of the word ‘eo’,

Eeyo?
- Ayo.

Eo.
- Therefore.

Look right at this line here.

Neque porro quisquam est, qui do-
and then lorem ipsum

quia dolor sit, amet.
- Right.

I thought this was very intriguing.

And then this other one
- It is indeed.

is this German one from 1887.

And this actually, same word you looked for.

Look it says: Neque porro quisquam est,
qui do- lorem ipsum.

So I found these and I got excited.

But then when I looked further, they do
both just cut off after only one sentence.

And I do think someone is very unlikely
to have the phrase Lorem

ipsum because of the cutoff
in one of these dictionaries,

and then had to go find another book
to get the rest of the excerpt.

I do think evidence still stands
for the 1914 version.

But the other thing I went looking for,

the other angle I wanted to
try, was looking for just any dummy text

that was used before Lorem ipsum,
just to see if it would come up

in some archive of that.

That's when I found the direct ancestor
to Lorem Ipsum.

Centuries ago, typographers used to
copy a juicier Cicero quote.

The start of a speech

exposing the senator Catiline
for plotting to overthrow the government.

Quousque tandem abutere,
Catilina, patientia nostra?

It was so common in the 17

and 1800s, that it literally changed
the shape of the capital letter Q

as typographers competed to make
their tails longer and more impressive.

I found all of these from what
I was really looking for, which was like

an archive, really cataloging
all the type specimens at the time.

And that is this book.
Daniel Berkeley Updike's Printing Types.

It is so well done
and so rigorously documented,

I got lost in that book for a very long
time. But when you comb through the more

than 200 illustrations in the book,
there is absolutely nothing

besides the Catalina quote
and English quotes or prayers.

That's it.

What's also interesting
is that this book was published in 1922.

To me, this was also useful

to see that Lorem ipsum
had not been documented prior to 1922.

The biggest thing
is that the whole concept of dummy

text did not happen
until the middle of the 20th century.

Oh, and why was that?

There was no way to do dummy text in
those days because it was all lead type.

A page of type would probably take
the better part of half an hour to set.

I see, so you're saying there's
also kind of a purpose

driven or history reason
why it wouldn't have existed earlier?

It would be a waste of time to set up
dummy text, basically, yes.

But in the timeline of Lorem ipsum,
we still have a huge gap

From 1914 to 1987.

So I attacked from the other direction

and found the person who brought Lorem
ipsum digital in Aldus Pagemaker.

I was there at the beginning, pretty much.

They wanted a designer to be involved
really early on.

Do you mind giving an intro to what
Aldus Pagemaker was?

It was kind of the first page layout

software. Before, you used a typewriter!

When updating the next version of Page
Maker,

Laura remembered something from her design
roots.

You know, production was expensive,
you had to kind of figure it all out

and spec it ahead of time.

When I was designing a feature story,
let's say, to layout the body text

Letraset made this rub down lettering
and you'd get sheets of this stuff.

And for the headline,
you’d rub down individual letters.

And for the body text
you'd get a sheet of the Lorem ipsum text.

So I decided that we should add it
as one of the tools

or the extras that you got
when you got the program.

We've reached the heart of the mystery.

Letraset is what I've been using to make
all the fun text throughout the video.

In the 60s, these little dry
transfer sheets transformed type design.

Before Letraset, designers
had to stencil lettering by hand

or pay a professional printer for it.

But now, with just a bit of pressing,

they could play with the core
elements of text, like:

Fonts. You know what that is.

Leading, or vertical space.

Tracking, or horizontal space.

Kerning, the individual spaces
between letters.

People mix these last two up -
track first, kern later.

And hierarchy. Headings
versus subheadings versus body type.

It's this dense, long body type
that really requires dummy text.

And Letraset, the cutting-edge
design tool, was already on it.

What I did,
I just took a sheet of this stuff

and one afternoon
really quickly typed it in.

Somebody was saying,
we got to get this done.

So I typed it in really fast
and I know I made some typos.

What were you thinking on that afternoon
as you were typing it up?

I was a little worried
in the back of my mind, it's like

is this copyright infringement?
I hope not.

Fingers crossed.

I made enough errors. I hope it's okay.

Could you have imagined
that it would go on to like,

Not in a million years, no.

If you see a nibh, zzril, or consectetuer
with an extra E,

that's Laura's Lorem ipsum.

But of course,

how did Letraset get Lorem ipsum?

That's why it would really be nice
to talk to somebody from Letraset,

to find out how they got to it in
the first place is the real mystery.

In fact, Before & After’s

original Lorem Oopsum correction
ends with a note to Richard.

Thank you for uncovering
the source of our dummy text.

Even Letraset, the graphics giant
who marketed it for 30 years,

didn't know what it was.

So began my search.

I combed through Letraset Body Type
from the 80s, the 70s,

undated body type,
catalog previews of body type,

ads for body type,

- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...
- Lorem ipsum dolor...

I sent dozens of emails to anyone
remotely associated with Letraset.

I searched online for every instance
of Lorem ipsum since 1914,

and ordered photocopies
from libraries across the country.

Okay, no one's emailed me back,
but I am closing in on an answer.

For decades
there are zero cases of Lorem ipsum,

but it suddenly pops up around 1967
to 1970.

Usually as tiny text
hiding in ads everywhere from the UK

to Mexico to Brazil.

These are all of the earliest

instances of Lorem ipsum
in print anywhere.

It's a Mexican clothing company,
and it doesn't even say Lorem ipsum,

but it says aliquam erat voluptat,

Which comes right after it, right.
- Exactly.

That’s fun.
- It’s fun, right?

This is from 1971, in Brazil.

Yeah. You've got a good eye
for the Lorem ipsum.

You can see the shape of it.
- Right.

The very earliest one I could find,
I swear,

is a December 1967 ad for milk
bottles in a British dairy magazine.

We continue to discuss milking cows
in every video.

Using 1967 as a benchmark,

I hunted for any Letraset sheets
from the years just before.

And by sheer luck, I found THIS on ebay.

This is by far
the oldest Lorem ipsum I've ever seen,

closing the timeline gap to just 50 years.

And it's the longest one

which allows for some
line by line matching.

I was able to find a copy of Letraset
with Lorem ipsum on it from 1966.

I'm going to do a little magic
trick for you.

I believe this is the first time
Letraset’s Lorem ipsum

has ever been entirely
traced to a source.

Take a look.

This sheet is one Lorem ipsum
passage repeated three times.

We already know Lorem ipsum matches

De Finibus
starting at the top of page 36.

So it's Lorem ipsum,

Lorem ipsum, and it all matches
through the end of the page here.

From there it follows the whole page
down to the end, nos amice et nebevol.

Then it jumps forward to page 56,
starting with molestias access potest,

down to the end again with
etiam mag quod cuis.

Kooyis.
- Cuis.

It's modified,
but it's definitely this whole page.

Then we hop down to page 70,
starting with guae ad amicos pertineren

down to sempitern aut
diuturning timer.

And then go to page 118,
starting with auam multa vitiose,

down to nullion diciud putialenim
depra et non.

This very, very dense
text of Lorem ipsum comes

from four different pages of this book.

What's also funny is
there are some phrases in other languages.

Es muy fuerte. That is 100% Spanish,

and another one is salar le grand,
which 100% is French.

In fact, I even found
where you would see

salar le grand, which is in talking about
Salmo salar, which is salmon.

Whoever is doing this
had some fun with adding these portions.

I have been known to add things into
dummy text when I’m using them myself.

Oh, yeah. There you go.

You can also see
they're all ascending pages.

Someone was just leafing through every,
you know, 20 or so pages

and creating Lorem ipsum.

You can see the thought process
almost by doing this dissection.

And I have had other people
tell me that it went on like this.

But no one ever bothered
pointing out that it was the exact pages.

Which is the definitive proof that it's
this book and not some other text.

Which, congratulations.
- Thank you.

Now we know where these words came from,
but not who or why.

The pre-Letraset trail

has been cold ever since Richard
first wrote to Before & After.

Honestly I mean, if you can dig out
something definitive, it will become like

a minor pop culture sensation
in the design world.

Lorem ipsum is still a hot topic there.

Actually, to this day, designers
still debate the whole practice

of placeholder text,
which they call greeking.

Ironic.

Some call it a design
crutch. Words are essential.

You need to evaluate your design together
with the content,

and fit your visuals
to the actual words on the page.

Cause if you set an obituary in Comic
Sans, you're insulting somebody.

So I can see that point,
but it's considerably outweighed

by the practical purposes
of the dummy text.

Others call it a helpful tool to start
designing without the final words ready.

And it can help prevent design meetings
from going off track with clients

caught up on exact wording.

Now it's a parallel process
rather than a sequential process.

Now you know
Typography 101 and form versus content,

you've got the basics of graphic design.

The thing is, even after finding all this
and doing this dissection,

I still don't know how-
- You got from here to there.

I had a bunch of emails out
to people and heard nothing back,

but I had a little bit of a clue in that,
by doing this work,

You can tell that
this was not the work of an amateur.

The garbled text is done
with a lot of care and knowledge.

You can see

a lot of rational decisions about why
it looks the way it does in there.

They are making very careful additions,
such as adding letters

that wouldn’t-
- The -ands and the -ngs, right.

The Y got stuck in
because that's an English letter.

See, the Latin alphabet
isn't exactly like English.

It doesn't use letters like J, K, Y, and Z,

while relying more on letters like
Q, U, and M.

If you look at the letters changed
in Lorem ipsum, Q’s and M’s are removed,

while Y's are added. And words were removed
surprisingly carefully.

The biggest change
is that they left out the quia,

that means because, which means
that it doesn't make any sense.

So it was a very smart removal,

a surgical removal of that one word
that creates meaning in the sentence.

And I think that may be why
they took it out.

I mean, it sounds like someone
who would have knowledge of both Latin

and English and graphic design.
- On a linguistic level.

Right.

Which is a pretty narrow field,
like expertise that you're looking for.

Someone like you, basically.

I think the fact that
it is garbled Latin text,

and that it has those other letters
in a fairly

Latin-based alphabet amount of frequency,
speaks to that

it was done very, very carefully.

And then, someone replied to my email.

Thanks to the powers that be,

someone at Letraset emailed me back.

And this is an email
I would like to read to you.

This is from Dave Farey,
one of the earliest designers at Letraset.

And he had a story.

At a marketing meeting
sometime during 1966,

publicity design manager Colin Orchard
mentioned that a sheet of dummy text

would be useful for his work,
and also for graphic designers generally.

They needed more expertise,
but fortunately Letraset had developed

a strong relationship with
the Saint Bride Printing Library,

and the head librarian, James Mosley.

James was an academic
who devoted his professional

life to the history and contemporary
use of printing and typography.

James realized that all type founders
in Europe and the USA use their own

placeholder text in their own language.
And he looked to an alternative,

as Latin was the core
for 90% of all Western languages.

And then he goes on to say that
Cicero's Catiline quote was too famous,

so James found another Cicero
quote and created Lorem ipsum.

Letraset adopted the Lorem ipsum
text copy as body type style in late 1966

or early 1967, with two fonts, Universe
and Times New Roman, adding six

additional type styles by 1971.

Does he tell us why he chose that?

He speculates. Probably it was
that there was another Cicero quotation

that had been used,
so this was a great alternative

Cicero choice,
and it may have been garbled

by more than one typesetter
working at his bench since the 1500s.

Oh merciful heavens.

The recursive-

Richard’s mistake may have come full circle,
but the rest of the story checks out.

James was a librarian
with heaps of old books,

a historian fluent in French,
Italian, German, and almost

certainly Latin,
and a world expert in typography.

I wish I made this video a year earlier.

Sadly, James passed away in 2025.

But if anyone related to him or in general
knows about the birth of Lorem ipsum, or

if any historians want to help me document
all this research, please email me.

While we can't ask James himself,

it feels very in the spirit of a type
historian that we’re tracing

his past thinking through the
design choices he made.

That's amazing.

You should’ve come by here
two years ago.

I can't believe you got this done.

Thank you to Dave.

He ends the message
with ‘Hoc est totem, amici’.

This is everything, friend.

I want to ask about how
this whole journey has affected your life.

Well, I generally like
to hide in dark corners

and this has been opening
those dark corners up, because people

from all over the world
have been emailing me for

30 years is it now?
- Wow.

Enthusiastic students come up to me
at Hampden-Sydney

and say, I finally get to meet you.

And it's just this completely baffles me.

I warn you that
this may not be the end of this for you.

I'm ready.

Bring it on.

People send me pictures of Chipotle bags
with Lorem ipsum on the side,

and people send me places
that Lorem ipsum has been

in The New York Times.

Pointed out that I have
been in a Hallmark movie, of all things.

Oh my gosh, it's Richard!

Oh yeah, the craziest part of all this

might be the fact that today,

Richard's own discovery
has become the placeholder.

That's because if you wanna go
make Lorem ipsum, it's easy.

There are dozens of different
Lorem ipsum sites.

There are generators

where you can make your own
apocryphal dummy text.

Telescope. Billions upon billions.

The carbon in our apple pies,
descended from astronomers.

Post-ironic soft launch, ego death tacos,

Echo Park xiao long bao, doomer praxis.

Cat ipsum dolor sit amet,

chase imaginary bugs. Chase imaginary
bugs flop over hopped up on goofballs

why must they do that. Hate dog snacks.

I tell you, it's a cult.

But the most common way

people do it is just by googling Lorem
ipsum and copying the first result.

This is lipsum.com, and it's very handy.

It randomizes the text
and even has different languages,

but it puts the history
before the lorem ipsum text itself.

So if you pull the first words
from the website using code,

or if you're just not looking closely,
you get this explainer.

Lorem ipsum is

simply dummy text of the printing
and typesetting industry.

Then later,

Richard McClintock, a Latin professor
at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia,

looked up one of the more obscure
Latin words, consectetur...

First of all, this ruins the
point of dummy text

because it's in English
and still distracting.

But most of all, it's just wrong.

It only has our very first story,
the false 1500s origin.

So when people post this filler text,
they're posting misinformation everywhere.

So I actually still have one thing
left to do.

I sent corrections out to all the Lorem
ipsum generator sites with the wrong info,

and, they changed it!

The fact that now

people recognize
just the words Lorem ipsum,

which are nonsense,
as a signifier of dummy text

is kind of beautiful.

As a thing, right.

Right. It is beautiful

that something designed to be
meaningless, has gained meaning.

I think that is so human.
- And significance, right.

So look closely the next time
you see Lorem ipsum in the wild.

Maybe you'll see our correction.

Now we've made our own little notch
in the ever-changing text of Lorem ipsum.

I'm immensely impressed with your energy.

Thank you.

I got very invested myself in this
journey, you know.

I now feel like a Lorem ipsum hunter,

like I care very deeply about this.

I hereby pass the world expert
title to you.

Oh, gosh.
This is a heavy burden to carry.

As always, in my description
I've linked a Google doc with

all my notes and sources from the video,

and I've linked my Patreon,
where I've uploaded my full interview

with Richard because he's just so great
and we nerd out so hard.

So that's totally free to watch,
and also totally free

to sign up for my Patreon newsletter too.

Or if you'd like to chip in to support
my next videos, you can.

Thanks for watching.