A pangram (Greek: pan gramma, "every letter") or holoalphabetic sentence 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.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. (Used for font samples by Beagle Bros)
How razorback-jumping frogs can level six piqued gymnasts. (Used for font samples by the Macintosh, System 7 era)
Cozy lummox gives smart squid who asks for job pen. (Used for font samples by the Macintosh, post-System 7)
Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.
The five boxing wizards jump quickly.
Adjusting quiver and bow, Zompyc killed the fox.
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)
Jaded zombies acted quaintly, but kept driving their seven oxen forward.
Perfect 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.
Jumbling vext frowzy hacks PDQ. (all words in high school dictionary)
(Constructing a short Japanese pangram is easy, since essentially all characters contain vowel sounds. Constructing a perfect Japanese pangram, however, is slightly more difficult because of the sheer number of characters; Japanese has over one hundred basic graphemes, or kana (including digraphs). The poem called the Iroha is a perfect Japanese pangram when considering only the basic, unmodified characters of its syllabary.)
Polish: Zażółć gęślą jaźń ("make your mind yellow with instrument")
Self-enumerating pangrams
A particularly interesting kind of pangram arose from some verbal horseplay between Douglas Hofstadter, an AI researcher and writer for Scientific American, Rudy Kousbroek, a Dutch linguist and essayist, and Lee Sallows, a British electronics engineer and all-round word virtuoso. Hofstadter posed the problem of sentences that describe themselves, prompting Sallows to devise the following: "Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sixteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !". Kousbroek published a Dutch equivalent, which spurred Sallows, who lives in the Netherlands and reads the paper where Kousbroek writes his essays, to think harder about this problem in order to solve it more generally. Initial attempts to write a program for this came to naught, but after a while he decided to construct a dedicated piece of hardware, the Pangram Machine. This accepts a description of the initial sentence fragment, and tries to fill in the blanks.
Uses of pangrams
Pangrams are used for a number of purposes other than games. For example, the pangram The quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog was developed by Western Union to test Telex/TWX data communication equipment for accuracy and reliability. Also, like lorem ipsum, pangrams are often used to display how a certain font will appear.
