blog by carson on 2 nov
What is Lore Sum?
Lore Sum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lore Sum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularized in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lore Sum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lore Sum.
Why do we use it?
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lore Sum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lore Sum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem Epsom' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected hum our and the like).
- dasdffds
- dafsdf
- dsfadf
- dfadsf
- dsfad
- fsdfadsf
- dsf
- sdfads
- dfasfds
- fasdfsdfsd
- dsafsdfsd
- dsfadf
- dafdsf
- fadsfdfa
Where does it come from?
Contrary to popular belief, Lore Sum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lore Sum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the redoubtable source. Lore Sum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Minibus Bono rum et Malory" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lore Sum, "Lore Epsom dolor sit amen..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.
The standard chunk of Lore Sum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from "de Minibus Bono rum et Malory" by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Markham.
Where can I get some?
There are many variations of passages of Lore Sum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected hum our, or randomized words which don't look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lore Sum, you need to be sure there isn't anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lore Sum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lore Sum which looks reasonable. The generated Lore Sum is therefore always free from repetition, injected hum our, or non-characteristic words etc.
