Pangram
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.
Examples
- The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
- Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
- 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)
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)
- Mr. Jock, TV Quiz Ph.D, bags few lynx.
Other languages
All letters
- Dutch: Sexy qua lijf, doch bang voor 't zwempak ("sexy by body, though scared by the swimsuit")
- French: Allez porter ce whisky au vieux juge blond qui fume ("Go take this whisky to the old blond judge who is smoking")
- German (no umlauts or ß): Sylvia wagt quick den Jux bei Pforzheim ("Sylvia dares quickly the joke at Pforzheim").
- German (with umlauts and ß): Zwölf Boxkämpfer jagten Victor quer über den großen Sylter Deich ("Twelve box fighters chased Victor across the great dam of Sylt").
- Esperanto: Laŭ Ludoviko Zamenhof bongustas freŝa ĉeĥa manĝaĵo kun spicoj. ("According to Ludwig Zamenhof, fresh Czech food with spices tastes good.")
- Hebrew: דג סקרן שט בים מאוכזב ולפתע מצא לו חברה איך הקליטה ?
- Icelandic: Kæmi ný öxi hér ykist þjófum nú bæði víl og ádrepa
- Japanese: Iroha (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.)
- Lojban: o'i mu xagji sofybakni cu zvati le purdi ("Watch out, five hungry Soviet-cows are in the garden!")
- Polish: (each letter exactly once) Pójdźże, kiń tę chmurność w głąb flaszy. ("Come on, drop your sadness into the depth of a bottle.")
- Portuguese: Gazeta publica hoje no jornal uma breve nota de faxina na quermesse. ("The journalists publish today at the newspaper a short note about the cleaning at the kirmiss")
- Russian: (without ъ) В чащах юга жил бы цитрус? Да, но фальшивый экземпляр! ("Would a citrus live in the bushes of south? Yes, but only a fake one!")
- Slovene: "Šerif bo za vajo spet kuhal domače žgance." ("For an exercise, sheriff wil again make home-made mush.")
- Spanish: (with ñ and diacritics) El veloz murciélago hindú comía feliz cardillo y kiwi. La cigüeña tocaba el saxofón detrás del palenque de paja. ("The quick Hindu bat ate happy golden thistle and kiwi. The stork played the saxophone behind the straw arena.")
- Swedish: "Flygande bäckasiner söka hwila på mjuka tuvor." ("Flying snipes seeks rest on soft tufts [of grass]") (lacks q, x and z); "Yxskaftbud, ge vår wczonmö iqhjälp" (Axe handle messenger, give our WC zone maiden IQ help)
- Italian: "Quel vituperabile xenofobo zelante assaggia il whisky ed esclama: alleluja!" ("that blameworthy and zealous xenophobe tastes his whisky and says: Alleluja!)
Only non-English letters
A variant tries to make a word or phrase containing at least all letters which are not in the English alphabet:
- Esperanto: Eĥoŝanĝo ĉiuĵaŭde ("echo change every Thursday")
- German: Heizölrückstoßabdämpfung ("fuel oil recoil absorber")
- Hungarian: Árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép ("flood-proof mirror-drilling machine")
- Icelandic: Sævör grét áðan því úlpan var ónýt
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, pangrams are often used to display how a certain font will appear.
