A pangram , or holoalphabetic sentence , phrase, or word, uses every letter of a given alphabet at least once. Pangrams can be utilised to display typefaces , test equipment, or develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy , and typing, amongst other uses. The best-known English pangram is " The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog ". [ 1 ] It has been used since at least the late 19th century [ 1 ] and was used by Western Union to test Telex / TWX data communication equipment for accuracy and reliability. [ 2 ] Pangrams like this are now used by a number of computer programs to display computer typefaces. Short pangrams in English are more difficult to devise, and may require uncommon words or unlikely sentences. Longer pangrams afford more opportunity for clever or humorous turns of phrase. The following table lists several pangrams of 35 letters or fewer that use no abbreviations or proper nouns: Perfect pangrams A perfect pangram contains every letter of the alphabet only once; as such, it is an anagram of the alphabet. The only known perfect pangrams of the English alphabet use abbreviations or other non-dictionary words, such as "Blowzy night-frumps vex'd Jack Q." or "Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx." [ 3 ] or they include words so obscure that the phrase is challenging to understand, such as "Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz", [ 3 ] in which cwm is a loan word from Welsh meaning an amphitheatre-like glaciated depression, vext is an uncommon way to spell vexed , and quiz is used in an archaic sense to mean a puzzling or eccentric person. Taken together, it means "Symbols in the bowl-like depression on the edge of a long steep sea inlet confused an eccentric person". Other writing systems may present more options: The Iroha is a well-known perfect pangram of the Japanese syllabary , while the Hanacaraka is a perfect pangram for the Javanese script and is commonly used to order its letters in sequence. Other languages Using the Latin script Whereas the English language uses all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet in native and naturalized words, many other languages using the same alphabet do not. Pangram writers in these languages are forced to choose between only using those letters found in native words or incorporating exotic loanwords into their pangrams. Some words, such as the Gaelic -derived whisk(e)y , which has been borrowed by many languages and uses the letters k , w and y , are frequent fixtures of many foreign pangrams. There are also languages that use other Latin characters that do not appear in the traditional 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. This differs further from English pangrams, with letters such as ç , ä , and š . Other alphabetic scripts Non-Latin alphabetic or phonetic scripts such as Greek, Armenian, and others can also have pangrams. [ 11 ] In some writing systems, exactly what counts as a distinct symbol can be debated. For example, many languages have accents or other diacritics, but one might count "é" and "e" as the same for pangrams. A similar problem arises for older English orthography that includes the long s ("ſ"). There is also a version with every niqqud included (with repetitions) except the Sin dot: Punjabi (Shahmukhi) ڈِٹھے پار پہاڑ حضوری دے، طلسمی ژالہ باری ظلمت دی ۔ فیر جاکے ٹِبے غار حراء دے، خبر دِتتِی چاراں پاسے۔ اک ذہین زور آور نے فقیری دی۔ ہس کے نالے گج وج کے ذمے داری نال دسیا ثمر صبر دا، حاصل عشق دا، جیہڑا ہے کل پیغام بر اثر چنین تلقین و شستشوی مغزی جامعی، سطح و پایهٔ ذهن و فهم و نظر بعضی اشخاص واژگونه و معکوس می‌شود. Non-alphabetic scripts Logographic scripts, or writing systems such as Chinese that do not use an alphabet but are composed principally of logograms , cannot produce pangrams in a literal sense (or at least, not pangrams of reasonable size). The total number of signs is large and imprecisely defined, so producing a text with every possible sign is practically impossible. However, various analogies to pangrams are feasible, including traditional pangrams in a romanization . In Japanese , although typical orthography uses kanji (logograms), pangrams can be made using every kana , or syllabic character. The Iroha is a classic example of a perfect pangram in non-Latin script. In Chinese, the Thousand Character Classic is a 1000-character poem in which each character is used exactly once; however, it does not include all Chinese characters . The single character 永 (permanence) incorporates all the basic strokes used to write Chinese characters, using each stroke exactly once, as described in the Eight Principles of Yong . Among abugida scripts, an example of a perfect pangram is the Hanacaraka (hana caraka; data sawala; padha jayanya; maga bathanga) of the Javanese script , which is used to write the Javanese language in Indonesia . All 50 letters of the Bengali alphabet are present in this pangram published in Shubach Little Mag . This sentence consists of all vowels , vowel diacritics , and consonants , but does not contain all conjunct consonants . Sanskrit pangrams focus on consonants alone, since Sandhi rules make it extremely difficult to create a pangram showing vowels distinctly. Self-enumerating pangrams A self-enumerating pangram is a pangrammatic autogram , or a sentence that inventories its own letters, each of which occurs at least once. The first example was produced by Rudy Kousbroek , a Dutch journalist and essayist, who publicly challenged Lee Sallows , a British recreational mathematician resident in the Netherlands, to produce an English translation of his Dutch pangram. In the sequel, Sallows built an electronic "pangram machine", that performed a systematic search among millions of candidate solutions. The machine was successful in identifying the following 'magic' translation: [ 12 ] [ 13 ] [ 14 ] Chris Patuzzo was able to reduce the problem of finding a self-enumerating pangram to the boolean satisfiability problem . He did this by using a made-to-order hardware description language as a stepping stone and then applied the Tseytin transformation to the resulting chip. [ 15 ] [ 16 ] Pangrams in literature The pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", and the search for a shorter pangram, are the cornerstone of the plot of the novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn . [ 17 ] The search successfully comes to an end when the phrase "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs" is discovered (which has only 6 duplicated vowels). The scientific paper Cneoridium dumosum (Nuttall) Hooker F. Collected March 26, 1960, at an Elevation of about 1450 Meters on Cerro Quemazón, 15 Miles South of Bahía de Los Angeles, Baja California, México, Apparently for a Southeastward Range Extension of Some 140 Miles has a pangrammatic title. Panalphabetic window Pangrammatic window Pangrammatic lipogram Pandigital number , the same idea for integers in a given base Abecedarium – Inscription consisting of the letters of an alphabet Ambigram – Symmetrical calligraphic or typographic visual pun Chromatic scale – Musical scale set of twelve pitches Music written in all major or minor keys Heterogram – Word, phrase or sentence with no repeated letter Lipogram – Writing that avoids specific letters ↑ Per the Deutsches Wörterbuch , the letter y was common in the German language until around the 16th century, when standardisation due to the rise of the printing press largely replaced it with the letter i . It remained in use in some cases until the 19th century, during which further spelling reforms restricted it to loanwords and proper names. [ 7 ] 1 2 3 "Current Notes". The Boston Journal : 1. February 10, 1885. 1 2 Evans, Rod L. (2012-06-05). Tyrannosaurus Lex: The Marvelous Book of Palindromes, Anagrams, and Other Delightful and Outrageous Wordplay . Penguin. p. 51. ISBN 978-1-10-158863-5 – via Google Books. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Augarde, Tony (2003). The Oxford guide to word games (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 119– 122. ISBN 0-19-866264-5 . OCLC 51437459 . ↑ Naulty, Leslie (30 September 1913). "The Pan-Alphabet Chief: Seven Word, Twenty-Nine Letter Sentence Takes the Record" . The Sun . p. 6 . Retrieved 22 September 2022 . ↑ Ramin, Həsənəlizadə. "hər şey haqqında" . hasanalizade.azeriblog.com . Archived from the original on May 14, 2008. ↑ pangram author Kenneth Rosenkilde (2000), pangram noted here by Martin B. Borup. ↑ "Y, n. bis Yard, n." . Deutsches Wörterbuch (in German) . Retrieved 6 April 2025 . ↑ Ciura, Marcin (2018-12-17). "More perfect Polish pangrams" . marcinciura.wordpress.com . ↑ (in Romanian) Academia Română, Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române , Entry for K , Editura Univers Enciclopedic, 1998, dexonline.ro ↑ "The Instagram post for the pangram" . www.instagram.com . Retrieved 2025-03-28 . ↑ "Greek Pangrams" . backpacker.gr . Retrieved 2025-02-12 . ↑ Dewdney, A.K. (October 1984). "Computer Recreations". Scientific American . pp. 18– 22. ↑ "In quest of a pangram". Abacus (defunct mag.). Vol. 2, no. 3. New York, NY: Springer Verlag. Spring 1985. pp. 22– 40. ↑ Weiss, E.A., ed. (1987). " " In quest of a pangram " (abridged reprint)". A Computer Science Reader . New York, NY: Springer-Verlag. pp. 200– 220. ISBN 0-387-96544-0 . ↑ Seemingly disconnected things (podcast). Why are computers . Retrieved 2016-08-19 . ↑ "Another approach for finding self-enumerating pangrams" . Chapter 35: Sequential sorting . The New Turing Omnibus. § show & tell . Retrieved 2015-10-20 . ↑ Malin, Irving (2003). "Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel In Letters". Review of Contemporary Fiction . 23 (2): 153. Further reading Rutter, Richard (30 October 2014). "List of pangrams" . Clagnut . Retrieved 2026-03-13 . Pangram Finder at Wordsmith.org Fun With Words: Pangrams at RinkWorks Canons of page construction Recto and verso Intentionally blank page Widows and orphans runt Subscript and superscript Blackboard bold Sentence spacing Serif Antiqua Didone slab serif Display typeface script fat face reverse-contrast reverse-contrast Hanging punctuation Hyphen minus sign

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