The classic text is a scrambled, nonsensical variant of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin treatise on ethics written by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero. The opening words, "Lorem ipsum," are a truncation of dolorem ipsum, which translates directly to "pain itself". While printers have used variations of sections from classical works since the 1500s, the passage gained widespread modern popularity in the 1960s through Letraset transfer sheets and later became ubiquitous in digital web design during the 1980s via desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker