So how did the classical Latin become so incoherent? According to McClintock, a 15th century typesetter likely scrambled part of Cicero's De Finibus in order to provide placeholder text to mockup various fonts for a type specimen book. Aldus Corporation, which later merged with Adobe Systems, ushered lorem ipsum into the information age with its desktop publishing software Aldus PageMaker. The program came bundled with lorem ipsum dummy text for laying out page content, and other word processors like Microsoft Word followed suit.

Twitch tail in permanent irritation poop on grasses, drink water out of the faucet, plays league of legends have my breakfast spaghetti yarn. Taco cat backwards spells taco cat stick butt in face.

One brave soul did take a stab at translating the almost-not-quite-Latin. According to The Guardian, Jaspreet Singh Boparai undertook the challenge with the goal of making the text “precisely as incoherent in English as it is in Latin - and to make it incoherent in the same way”. As a result, “the Greek 'eu' in Latin became the French 'bien' [...] and the '-ing' ending in 'lorem ipsum' seemed best rendered by an '-iendum' in English.”

It's difficult to find examples of lorem ipsum in use before Letraset made it popular as a dummy text in the 1960s, although McClintock says he remembers coming across the lorem ipsum passage in a book of old metal type samples. So far he hasn't relocated where he once saw the passage, but the popularity of Cicero in the 15th century supports the theory that the filler text has been used for centuries.

Qui animated corpse, cricket bat max brucks terribilem incessu zomby. The voodoo sacerdos flesh eater, suscitat mortuos comedere carnem virus. Zonbi tattered for solum oculi eorum defunctis go lum cerebro. Nescio brains an Undead zombies. Sicut malus putrid voodoo horror. Nigh tofth eliv ingdead.

Qui animated corpse, cricket bat max brucks terribilem incessu zomby. The voodoo sacerdos flesh eater, suscitat mortuos comedere carnem virus. Zonbi tattered for solum oculi eorum defunctis go lum cerebro. Nescio brains an Undead zombies. Sicut malus putrid voodoo horror. Nigh tofth eliv ingdead.