[...] Turns out the passage doesn't just look like real Latin, it is real (although slightly scrambled), and from a famous source. This news came from Richard McClintock, a Latin professor turned publications director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Curious about what the words meant, McClintock had looked up one of the more obscure ones, consectetur, in a Latin dictionary. Going through the cites of the word in classical literature, he found one that looked familiar. Aha! Lorem ipsum was part of a passage from Cicero, specifically De finibus bonorum et malorum, a treatise on the theory of ethics written in 45 BC. The original reads, Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit . . . ("There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain . . .").
McClintock recalled having seen lorem ipsum in a book of early metal type samples, which commonly used extracts from the classics. "What I find remarkable," he told B&A, "is that this text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter- by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged." So much for the transitory nature of content in the information age.
Just one problem. When I spoke to McClintock recently, he said he'd been unable to locate the old type sample in which he thought he'd seen lorem ipsum. The earliest he could definitely trace back the passage was Letraset press-type sheets, which dated back only a few decades.
[...]
The Straight Dope: What does the filler text "lorem ipsum" mean?