Play around with pangrams

THE word pangram comes from the Greek ‘for all letters’ (pan: all and grámma:letter). A pangram is a series of words which contains all the letters of the alphabet.

Of course, it is not difficult to devise a pangram, but the art of creating a good pangram is in fulfilling not only the criterion that it contains all letters, but also that it is short, and it makes sense.

For many years they have had a practical application, as typographers have required such sentences as specimen text. This is useful because it displays every possible character in sample prints.

The most famous English pangram probably is ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’, but this is certainly not the shortest possible.

Pangrams are also used frequently for typing practice since they require every letter on the keyboard to be used.

They also make an interesting alternative to displaying characters of fonts in alphabetical order. If you double-click on a font file in MS Windows, a sample sheet will open, displaying the quick brown fox... text in the selected font at various point sizes.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

This is undoubtedly the best known pangram. It contains all 26 letters of the alphabet (as it must do in order to be a pangram) and is 35 letters long. That means that is not particularly 'economical' with 9 surplus letters.

Perfect pangrams of exactly 26 letters have been composed, but none makes much sense, being rather more a string of obscure words than a sentence. Listed below you will find a number of pangrams arranged in descending order of length (the number of letters used is shown in brackets).

How razorback jumping frogs can level six piqued gymnasts.(49)

Sixty zippers were quickly picked from the woven jute bag. (48)

Jump by vow of quick, lazy strength in Oxford. (36)

The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog. (33)

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. (32)

Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz. (31)

How quickly daft jumping zebras vex. (30)

Sphinx of black quartz: judge my vow. (29)

Quick zephyrs blow, vexing daft Jim. (29)

Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex bud. (28)

In the remaining pangrams, each letter of the alphabet occurs once and only once.

TV quiz drag nymphs blew JFK cox. (26)

Blowzy night-frumps vex'd Jack Q. (26)

It seems that almost half a millennium ago a printer scrambled a galley of type to produce the first pangram for a specimen book. The text was in Latin, of course, and so only 23 letters were required (Latin does not use J, V or W).

The phrase was rather nonsensical Latin. It is the most famous Latin pangram text and it is still used, in a remarkably little-altered form, by typographical designers:

You may be beginning to wonder why it is necessary to use Latin, and nonsense Latin at that, in typographical design and font examples. There are several reasons for this. Not only does it include every available letter, but it is represents a typical English sentence in terms of word length too, thus obtaining the same 'balance' as 'real text'. It has also been suggested that, since this text conveys no meaning, a reader who is supposed to be scrutinising a page layout or font face does not get distracted by the subject of the text.