Pangram

A pangram is a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet at least once, the best known being 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'.

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Count the alphabet: every letter from A to Z appears at least once. That is a pangram, from the Greek for "every letter".

Famous and useful examples

• "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs."
• "How vexingly quick daft zebras jump!"
• "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow."

A perfect pangram uses each letter exactly once, so it has exactly twenty-six letters. Perfect ones exist, such as "Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx", but they depend on abbreviations and are stilted.

What pangrams are for

Printers, typists and type designers use pangrams to show every letter of a font or to test a keyboard. They are also a language game: the shorter the sentence, the more impressive the feat. A good pangram reads naturally, which is the hard part, since the rare letters J, Q, X and Z need to be fitted in.

Why it matters to a writer or editor

Anyone who works with type will meet pangrams as specimen text. They also show how letters are distributed in English: Q, X and Z are rare, which is why a sentence that holds them all feels clever. A pangram is a good exercise in sentence building under constraint, like a palindrome or a lipogram, its mirror image. For a different letter-shuffling puzzle, see the anagram.

Frequently asked questions

What is a perfect pangram?

A sentence that uses each of the twenty-six letters exactly once. They are very hard to write in natural English and tend to rely on odd abbreviations or rare words.

Why is 'The quick brown fox' so famous?

It is short, readable and uses every letter, so typists, teachers and font designers have used it for over a century to test keyboards and typefaces.

What is the opposite of a pangram?

A lipogram, a text that deliberately avoids one letter, such as the novel Gadsby, which never uses the letter E.