Greeking

What Does Greeking Mean?

In graphic design and visual IT, greeking is the process of using symbols or illegible text to represent text templates for the purposes of layout or previews. This process is called greeking because of the phrase “it’s Greek to me” used to refer to the Greek language.

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Techopedia Explains Greeking

Greeking can be done in a number of ways. One particular type of greeking is done when preview rendering uses lines, bars or other text symbols to stand in for text that would otherwise be too small to read.

Another very popular type of greeking is called “lorem ipsum” – this jumble of Latin can be found on many Web pages across the Internet, and has its roots in a commonly devised templating scheme to provide illegible text for layout. The idea is that actual text could distract someone from evaluating the layout, so “lorem ipsum,” a cobbled-together nonsense Latin text, was used as a replacement. On the Web, lorem ipsum text often indicates that no one has uploaded actual content to a site yet, and so the lorem ipsum text is standing in for actual content until it is created and uploaded.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…