What we require
McClintock's eye for detail certainly helped narrow the whereabouts of lorem ipsum's origin, however, the “how and when” still remain something of a mystery, with competing theories and timelines.
What you’ll be doing
So how did the classical Latin become so incoherent? According to McClintock, a 15th century typesetter likely scrambled part of Cicero's De Finibus in order to provide placeholder text to mockup various fonts for a type specimen book.
- It's difficult to find examples of lorem ipsum in use before Letraset made it popular as a dummy text in the 1960s,
- So far he hasn't relocated where he once saw the passage
- Cicero in the 15th century supports the theory that the filler text has been used for centuries.
Don't bother typing “lorem ipsum” into Google translate. If you already tried, you may have gotten anything from "NATO" to "China", depending on how you capitalized the letters. The bizarre translation was fodder for conspiracy theories, but Google has since updated its “lorem ipsum” translation to, boringly enough, “lorem ipsum”.
One brave soul did take a stab at translating the almost-not-quite-Latin. According to The Guardian, Jaspreet Singh Boparai undertook the challenge with the goal of making the text “precisely as incoherent in English as it is in Latin.
