What’s This Latin?

Seeing the layouts of your book is a thrill for any author. It's the first time your words start to look like a book.

But new authors sometimes notice blocks of foreign text, especially in books with pictures.

The placeholder text is usually known as Lorem ipsum. It's Latin and it's thought to have been written 2,000 years ago by Cicero.

Designers and printers have used Lorem ipsum as dummy text for over 500 years to check how a finished layout will appear.

The Latin has the average distribution of capital letters, letters with ascenders (b, d, k), and letters with descenders (j, p, q). It gives a good visual impression of what the space will look like with real text in. Lorem ipsum lets a designer create layouts before the text is written, or lets them indicate where they think more words would be useful to improve the appearance of a page.

It's rarer now than it once was, but it's worth knowing about in case it ever crops up.