Using Lorem ipsum to focus attention on graphic elements in a webpage design proposal One of the earliest examples of the Lorem ipsum placeholder text on 1960s advertising. In publishing and graphic design , Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. Lorem ipsum may be used as a placeholder before final copy is available. It is also used to temporarily replace text in a process called greeking , which allows designers to consider the form of a webpage or publication, without the meaning of the text influencing the design. Lorem ipsum is typically a corrupted version of De finibus bonorum et malorum , a 1st-century BC text by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero , with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical and improper Latin . The first two words themselves are a truncation of ' dolorem ipsum ' ('pain itself').