Ipsy lipsy lopsy lorum

In publishing and design, ipsy lipsy lopsy lorum—commonly known as lorem ipsum—is placeholder, or dummy, text. The use of dummy text allows the typography and layout of a page to be designed without using the actual text. This is useful for many reasons: editing and design might be occurring simultaneously, and the manuscript is not ready for layout; the text might not be written at all, so the use of dummy text can determine the word count required; meaningful text can be distracting if the graphic elements are the main focus of a presentation; more words might need to be added and dummy text can be used as filler. Back when we used Quark instead of InDesign, there was a plug-in that allowed you to choose the language of your dummy text: Klingon was particularly popular! Lorem ipsum is based on a first-century text by Cicero, and although it looks Latin, the words have been scrambled and changed so that it is nonsense Latin. As for what you call it—placeholder, dummy, Latin, lorem ipsum—I’ve always called it ipsy lipsy lopsy lorum, or ipsy lipsy for short.