laborum

Laborum is the genitive plural form of the Latin noun labor, which means work, toil, or effort. The noun labor is masculine and belongs to the third declension; its genitive singular is laboris, and its genitive plural is laborum. As a genitive plural, laborum is used to indicate possession or a partitive relation, roughly translated as “of the labors” or “of the work.”

In Classical Latin, laborum appears in phrases describing multiple labors or efforts, but it functions strictly as a grammatical form rather than a standalone meaning. The form is widely recognized today mainly because it appears in the famous placeholder text known as Lorem ipsum. In that context, the line id est laborum is commonly cited as the closing sentence; the surrounding text is intentionally scrambled Latin used to simulate real typography and layout rather than to convey a coherent message. Because of this, laborum is often encountered by students and designers primarily through its appearance in Lorem ipsum rather than through classical prose.

Overall, laborum is a standard Latin inflected form rather than a standalone lexical entry in modern usage. Its prominence in modern contexts comes from the Lorem ipsum filler text, where it helps give the appearance of authentic Latin text without carrying a substantive meaning.