A
pangram (
Greek:
pan gramma, all letters) is a piece of text which uses every letter of the
alphabet. Most pangrams are short, usually a single sentence: the aim in devising a pangram as a
word game is to be as brief as possible.
In a sense, the pangram is the opposite of the lipogram, where the aim is to omit one or more letters.
Today, pangrams are frequently used to display typefaces.
Examples
- The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
- Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
- Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.
- The five boxing wizards jump quickly.
- Bright vixens jump; dozy fowl quack.
- Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim.
- My faxed joke won a pager in the cable TV quiz show.
- Oh, wet Alex, a jar, a fag! Up, disk, curve by! Man Oz, Iraq, Arizona, my Bev? Ruck's id-pug, a far Ajax, elate? Who? (also a palindrome)
26-letter pangrams
A pangram in which each letter occurs only once is the pinnacle of the pangram game. This is difficult to achieve without resorting to obscure words and proper nouns; note that purists disapprove of using initials.
- New job: fix Mr. Gluck's hazy TV, PDQ! (includes 5 punctuation symbols)
- Squdgy fez, blank jimp crwth vox! (created by Claude Shannon)
- Frowzy things plumb vex'd Jack Q.
- J. Q. Vandz struck my big fox whelp.
- Quartz glyph job vex'd cwm finks.
- Phlegms fyrd wuz qvint jackbox.
- Zing, vext cwm fly jabs Kurd qoph.
- Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz.
Other languages
- French: Allez porter ce whisky au vieux juge blond qui fume ("Go take this whisky to the old blond judge who is smoking")
- German (no umlauts or ß): Sylvia wagt quick den Jux bei Pforzheim ("Sylvia dares quickly the joke at Pforzheim").
- German (with umlauts and ß): Zwölf Boxkämpfer jagten Victor quer über den großen Sylter Deich ("Twelve box fighters chase Victor across the great dam of Sylt").
- Esperanto: Laŭ Ludoviko Zamenhof bongustas freŝa ĉeĥa manĝaĵo kun spicoj. ("According to Ludwig Zamenhof, fresh Czech food with spices tastes good.")
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