“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit” is probably the most popular sentence in the world that is not meant to be read. “Lorem Ipsum” (shorthand for the entire, seemingly endless body of Latin text) is the green screen of the publishing world — placeholder copy used by designers to replicate how a block of text will look and how many words it will fit before swapping in the fully written article. This apparent gibberish, however, has been used for this purpose since the 1500s, and its foundation goes back even further. According to lipsum.com:

It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 B.C., making it more than 2,000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the citations of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (“The Extremes of Good and Evil”) by Cicero, written in 45 B.C.

Who Made That Dummy Text? – NYTimes.com.