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People use the term greeking for typical placeholder text because it derived from a piece of apparently nonsense text that usually starts Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit…. Such text first appeared in typography sample books around 500 years ago. It’s the old version of The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Since then, its use slowly transitioned to becoming common for general placeholder text. But what is greeking? The best known version of greeked text’s oral history is that it comprises random Latin words and means nothing. In fact, it is a mostly unmodified passage from Cicero's De Finibus, a treatise on the theory of ethics from 45 BC that experienced a resurgence in popularity during the Renaissance. It begins with Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci veldt…, which means There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain…. The actual origins of greeking’s first use in sample text are lost to history, but its use most likely came about simply because a printer had already set the text in type and kept using it for other samples. Making unauthorized copies of printed works was common during that era—which led to the development of the copyright—so making word-for-word copies of even a sample book makes logical sense. What is more shocking is that the text has remained largely unchanged and is still in use 500 years later.

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People use the term greeking for typical placeholder text because it derived from a piece of apparently nonsense text that usually starts Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit…. Such text first appeared in typography sample books around 500 years ago. It’s the old version of The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Since then, its use slowly transitioned to becoming common for general placeholder text. But what is greeking? The best known version of greeked text’s oral history is that it comprises random Latin words and means nothing. In fact, it is a mostly unmodified passage from Cicero's De Finibus, a treatise on the theory of ethics from 45 BC that experienced a resurgence in popularity during the Renaissance. It begins with Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci veldt…, which means There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain…. .