Why do people use Latin for example text?

It's called Lorem ipsum:

Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 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 cites 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 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

From: lipsum.com

The reason people use Latin is because it is obvious that it's placeholder text. Anytime someone gets lazy and types English text, even if it's supposedly obvious like "THIS IS PLACEHOLDER TEXT. REMOVE BEFORE PUBLISHING!" that is exactly what gets pushed to the production website at some point.

Be there, done that.

Signed, Loren ipsum

;)

I think it's "pretty cool" to use Latin (Lorem Ipsum) instead of english... example text is usually alot of nonsense text anyway, so it might as well look "cool" :)

I've found it's most commonly used in presentation of prototypes, where the developers don't want the clients to focus on text. If you put something that they're clearly not meant to understand, they won't attempt to interprete it. I guess it also looks somewhat intelligent, writing in Latin? Much better than "todo: Write something here".

My development team was encouraged to use a Lorem Ipsum generator, which generated random Latin "jibberish". I gather this sort of thing is common in the development environment.

The Latin text Lorem ipsum is used as placeholder text for a number of reasons. The two main ones are as follows:

• The spacing and word size is varied enough that it gives a good representation of what an average amount of text will look like in a given layout.
• Since it's not actually readable text to most people, the contents of the text do not distract from the layout itself.