http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2290/what-does-the-filler-text-lorem-ipsum-mean
"Turns out the passage doesn't just look like real Latin, it is real (although slightly scrambled), and from a famous source. This news came from Richard McClintock, a Latin professor turned publications director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Curious about what the words meant, McClintock had looked up one of the more obscure ones, consectetur, in a Latin dictionary. Going through the cites of the word in classical literature, he found one that looked familiar. Aha! Lorem ipsum was part of a passage from Cicero, specifically De finibus bonorum et malorum, a treatise on the theory of ethics written in 45 BC. The original reads, Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit . . . ("There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain . . .").
McClintock recalled having seen lorem ipsum in a book of early metal type samples, which commonly used extracts from the classics. "What I find remarkable," he told B&A, "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." So much for the transitory nature of content in the information age. "
... But it's easier to believe that someone at Letraset simply copied the text from an old hot-type source.
- Cecil Adams
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