By bbr

Have you ever looked at a webpage that’s under design and been confused to see your carefully crafted copy rendered in some unreadable foreign language? If you’re not familiar with greeking, you might well wonder what’s going on. That text you see beginning “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,” is a standard passage used as placeholder copy throughout the printing and design industries.

It’s called greeking and though it may look like gobbledygook, using this kind of dummy copy is a long tradition with a specific purpose. If you’ve got a classical background, you may recognize the words as Latin, or even be able to pinpoint the source: Cicero’s de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, first published in 45 B.C. And if you’re really on top of your Cicero, you’ll pick up on the fact that what you see isn’t a complete or correct transcript of the sections it comes from.

So why on earth does your design have a bunch of Latin shoved in where your real copy should be? Greeking allows you and the design team to focus on the page’s layout and look, avoiding the tendency to get distracted by readable content. Once your brain has categorized the text you see as irrelevant and meaningless, you’re able to put it aside and concentrate on images, colors, alignment and all the other design elements that go into making your page visually coherent and appealing.

Lorem ipsum passages look like normal sentences in terms of word length and distribution, so it’s easy to see what the page will look like in the end. If your final copy were shown, you would focus on reading the words whether or not you wanted to. That’s just the way we’re wired. But with greeking, the design remains the focus and the page approximates the finished product – much more so than if the text block were empty except for “content goes here” or something similar.

The practice of greeking began way back in the 1500s and successfully made the leap to digital publishing. It is frequently used in advertising, web design, typography and other print and graphic layouts. Besides enhancing the focus on design, greeking lets you create templates and individual pages beforehand, only adding the true copy when the time is right.

The text itself has seen changes over the years, with many lorem ipsum blocks today containing random, scrambled words. This can lead to unintentional jokes or inappropriate comments scattered within the copy. Added words or phrases sometimes include these elements on purpose.

Most lorem ipsum generators you find online will give you a block of any length, sometimes even in the language of your choice, but it’s likely to contain repeated chunks of copy. Lipsum.com promises repetition-free text, with several varying sentence structures for the most natural appearance. Here’s another generator that offers the same thing. Both commit to providing dummy copy free of amusing juxtapositions, intentional or otherwise, or added content.

Some changes from Cicero’s original passage are purposeful. The letters K, W and Z don’t appear in Latin, so they are often inserted into lorem ipsum copy to make it seem more like English and other European languages at a glance. Other letters and words are removed or switched around to make it more nonsensical. Greeking doesn’t always involve Cicero, either. At times different passages from ancient Latin texts are the source, or texts from other cultures might be used for generating dummy copy in the relevant languages.

In every case, the point is to ensure the copy looks realistic but doesn’t actually mean anything, even to a confirmed classicist, so it can’t detract from any viewer’s ability to concentrate solely on the design. And why is it called greeking when the text is actually Latin? When it was first used in the 1500s, there were still plenty of people who could read Latin so it was jumbled up a bit and moved about, appearing to some to read more like the harder-to-grasp Greek. Nowadays, as was the case way back when, when you look at the words you have no idea what they say, as in, “It’s Greek to me!”

Now you’ll never again have to call a designer or marketing professional in a panic, shouting, “What happened to my lovely web copy? All I see is a bunch of nonsense!” You’ll immediately recognize that you’re seeing greeking in action, and know that it belongs there. Doesn’t that feel better?