Cicero is Holding You Back

One of the oldest things on your computer—and it’s definitely on your computer—is a garbled, 2100 year-old text written by Cicero:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit , consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum is a Latin-language pangram: it contains every letter in the Latin alphabet. Apple’s Macintosh popularized it as placeholder text in the 1980’s because using Lorem instead of, say, excerpts from famous novels, can be really helpful. The Latin moves attention away from the content and toward the design in a process that designers call “Greeking,” as in, “it’s Greek to me.” The unfamiliar words also signal that the copy isn’t final (unless it is).

Because Lorem ipsum is a pangram, it’s a solid way to vet typefaces against the other design elements. Each letter of the alphabet makes it onto the page. Cicero’s original text had to be scrambled to make this possible for Lorem ipsum– so even for all seven of the world’s Latin speakers, it’s gibberish. There’s a disadvantage to using Lorem to check the typeface, though: Cicero’s Latin alphabet didn’t contain J, K, Q, W, Y, or Z.

Those missing letters are most likely why English-language pangrams have supplanted Lorem ipsum as placeholders. The most well-known pangram is probably the most coherent: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” A well-traveled bit of Americana, it first appeared in 1885 in The Michigan School Moderator as a suggestion for writing practice. By 1963, typewriter testing and practice had made it so ubiquitous that it was the first message sent on the Washington-Moscow hotline. Today, it’s the placeholder text in Microsoft Word.

Google Fonts uses “Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the evil queen and jack,” while InDesign’s text is “Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.” Coherence is valued here, in spite of the potential for distraction. It seems that users prefer to distracted and entertained, rather than focused and bored.

We’ve collected a handful of choice pangrams below. Whether you’re an incurable nerd, a historian, or a corporate designer desperate for comedy, we hope you enjoy.

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Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex!
Bright vixens jump; dozy fowl quack.
How quickly daft jumping zebras vex…
Five quacking zephyrs jolt my wax bed. (used by OS X)
The five boxing wizards jump quickly.
Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz. (used by Windows XP)
Schwarzkopf vexed Iraq big-time in July.
Fix problem quickly with galvanized jets.
Watch “Jeopardy!”, Alex Trebek’s fun TV quiz game.
Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the evil Queen and Jack. (used by Google fonts)
Few black taxis drive up major roads on quiet hazy nights.