So how did the classical Latin become so incoherent? According to McClintock, a 15th century typesetter likely scrambled part of Cicero’s De Finibus<\/em> in order to provide placeholder text to mockup various fonts for a type specimen book.<\/p>\n

It’s difficult to find examples of lorem ipsum<\/em> in use before Letraset made it popular as a dummy text in the 1960s, although McClintock says he remembers coming across the lorem ipsum<\/em> passage in a book of old metal type samples. So far he hasn’t relocated where he once saw the passage, but the popularity of Cicero in the 15th century supports the theory that the filler text has been used for centuries.<\/p>\n

McClintock wrote to Before & After<\/em> to explain his discovery;<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occasional ‘ing’ or ‘y’ thrown in.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And anyways, as Cecil Adams reasoned, \u201c[Do you really] think graphic arts supply houses were hiring classics scholars in the 1960s?\u201d Perhaps. But it seems reasonable to imagine that there was a version in use far before the age of Letraset.<\/p>\n

Whether a medieval typesetter chose to garble a well-known (but non-Biblical\u2014that would have been sacrilegious) text, or whether a quirk in the 1914 Loeb Edition inspired a graphic designer, it’s admittedly an odd way for Cicero to sail into the 21st century.<\/p>\n

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