English

Greeking in the form of a lorem ipsum placeholder text that was inadvertently published in The Straits Times, a Singapore newspaper, on 26 April 2014

Noun

greeking ‎(uncountable)

1. (computing, typography) Nonsense text or graphics inserted into a document as a placeholder to create a dummy layout, or to demonstrate a type font; the practice of using such placeholder text or graphics. [from 20th c.]
   • 2002, Deke McClelland, “The Interface”, in Real World Adobe Illustrator 10, Berkeley, Calif.: Peachpit Press, ISBN 978-0-201-77630-0, pages 46–47:

     If text gets smaller than this value, [Adobe] Illustrator shows the text blocks as gray bars, an operation called greeking. Both type size and view size figure into the equation, so that 6-point type greeks at 100-percent view size and 12-point type greeks at 50 percent. Greeking speeds the screen display because gray bars are easier to draw than individual characters.

   • 2007, David Blatner; Gene Gable, Real World QuarkXPress 7, Berkeley, Calif.: Peachpit Press, ISBN 978-0-321-35030-5:

     Designers have long worked with a concept known as greeking. Greeking is a method of drawing gray bars to represent blocks of text rather than taking the time to image them all on the screen. […] Unless you really want to see every character of every word at every size, there's hardly any reason to turn greeking off.

   • 2007, Susan E. L. Lake; Karen Bean, “Using Other Design Tools”, in The Business of Technology: Digital Desktop Publishing, Mason, Oh.: Thompson/South-Western, ISBN 978-0-538-44451-4, page 109:

     The use of greeking (also called dummy text) allows page designers to place text on a page without the actual content acting as a distraction. The history of greeking is unclear, but it was first used in the middle of the 20th century. The text was based on the words of Cicero, a Roman leader whose writings are admired. The language he spoke and wrote was Latin rather than Greek, so the naming of this dummy text is misleading.

See also

• lorem ipsum

Verb

greeking

1. present participle of greek.