What is Lorem Ipsum?
Lorem Ipsum is the standard placeholder text of the design and publishing world. It's used wherever a layout needs to be judged before the real content exists: in website drafts, print layouts, app mockups or presentations. Because the word sequence carries no intelligible meaning, the viewer's eye stays on what matters at this stage (type texture, line lengths, spacing and hierarchy) rather than getting caught on the content.
That is exactly its strength over real text: a draft with real wording provokes discussions about phrasing and spelling long before those questions are due. Lorem Ipsum decouples the design discussion from the content discussion, while still looking like "proper" text thanks to its natural distribution of word and sentence lengths.
Where does the text come from?
Its roots go back around 2,000 years: the word fragments stem, heavily distorted and shuffled, from Cicero's philosophical treatise "De finibus bonorum et malorum" (45 BC). The passage probably established itself as dummy text in 16th-century printing, when an unknown typesetter assembled a specimen book with scrambled type. Lorem Ipsum finally became the standard in the 1960s through Letraset transfer sheets and later through desktop publishing software that shipped the text as a filler option.
By the way: alongside the classic, countless fun variants exist, from Bacon Ipsum to Cupcake Ipsum to Bavarian dummy text. For professional drafts, though, the original remains the safe choice: it's neutral, understood internationally and guaranteed to distract no one.