It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.

It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.

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 humour, or non-characteristic words etc.

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 cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source.

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.

It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old.