A Catalogue of Useless Facts

Pangrams

Pangrams
- linguistics -

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​A "pangram" is a sentence that contains every letter of an alphabet at least once. The most common English example ("the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog") is often used to preview fonts. Though it does use all twenty-six English letters, some letters appear more than once.

Some other example pangrams:

"Bright vixens jump; dozy fowl quack." (29 letters)
"How quickly daft jumping zebras vex." (30 letters)
"The five boxing wizards jump quickly." (31 letters)

A "perfect pangram" contains every letter of the alphabet, with each letter only appearing one time. Because of a limited number of available vowels, these perfect pangrams often rely on abbreviations, extremely rare words, or loan words. A frequent English example is: "Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx."

A "pangrammatic window" is a pangram that occurs unintentionally within a pre-existing block of writing. The shortest known pangrammatic window appears in an internet review for the 1999 film "Magnolia":

"[...] in the production of certain "types" of subjectivity: for example, aging kid quiz show whiz Donnie Smith [...]" (36 letters)

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Sources ▼

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https://www.fun-with-words.com/pangrams.html
https://www.farside.org.uk/201410/pangrams_on_the_web