What does the default text mean?

You mean “Lorem Ipsum Dolear set Amet”....??

It is a good content placeholder that looks almost natural. It encompasses most all of the letters and displays the font in a nice paragraph form. Lorel Ipsum will be replaced with other text, but only the words will change, not the appearance.

It is gibberish latin and has no meaning. Google Lorem Ipsum

EDIT: Apparently it does mean something. Wikipedia:

H. Rackham’s 1914 translation (with major source of Lorem Ipsum highlighted):[2]

[32] But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?
[33] On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.

Quote from www.lipsum.com :

“Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. 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 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.”

There’s further information from that site regarding the history of it.

This is neat. Thanks for your responses.

I’ve heard that they’re excerpts from Virgil.

All you advertising and graphics folks out there will identify with this:

I’ve been writing ads and brochure for 40 years and I’ve rarely ever presented a preliminary layout or comp without hearing “That’s Greek to me.” Oy!

A much shorter version which comes in handy for either teaching handwriting to grade schoolers or brushing up on one’s touch typing is :

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.

It contains every letter of the alphabet :)