Where to find all the lorem ipsum you can take

This post is pretty geeky, I admit, but I just couldn't resist the topic. If you don't care about writing, publishing, typesetting, printing, graphic design, Medieval history, Roman philosophers, Latin or the Web, you should just move on now.

I love the Web for a million different reasons. Here is just one more: The American Library Association's online newsletter points readers to a website that explains what lorem ipsum is. You've probably seen the phrase before. "Lorem ipsum" are the first two faux words in a block of dummy text frequently used in laying out the pages of books and publications. According to American Libraries Direct, "Lorem Ipsum is dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. It has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s when an unknown printer took a galley of Latin type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book."

Not only that, but "the text actually comes from a garbled version of sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil) by [Marcus Tullius] Cicero, written in 45 B.C." The ALA newsletter editors know this, presumably, because they found a website that describes the history of lorem ipsum.

But wait, there's more! The website -- yes, it is called "Lorem Ipsum" -- will actually give you as much lorem ipsum dummy text as you can take. When it comes to lorem ipsum, the site says it is "the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humor, or non-characteristic words."

Thank goodness there's now a reliable online source of reasonable-looking lorem ipsum free of that bothersome injected humor!