You may think that you have no idea what a pangram is, but you do. You’ve certainly heard the phrase, “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy grey dog,” before. This strange little collection of words is perhaps the most famous pangram of all time, but it’s hardly alone.
A pangram is a phrase that contains all of the letters / characters of a given alphabet. We (being English speakers) most often think of English versions of this construct, but examples are provided in dozens of languages in the Wikipedia article on the subject, and there are certainly more out there that have not worked their way onto that resource. Further, there are classes of pangrams. There are ‘perfect’ pangrams, which use each letter in a given alphabet exactly once. So, for English, this would require that the pangram be exactly 26 characters. This is, as you can imagine, fairly difficult, and leads to some amusing and wholly ungrammatical chains of words. However, at least one example exists of a perfect pangram that also happens to be grammatically correct:
Bortz waqf glyphs vex muck djin. (Signage indicating endowments for industrial diamonds annoy filth-spreading genies. – created by Ed Spargo)
I dunno about you, but looking at that, I’m inclined to stick to my fox and dog. It’s doesn’t exactly roll off of the tongue, or nestle at the ready in one’s mind, to be called forth at will. But, if you’re not a fan of canines, but still want to get your pangram on (and aren’t too picky about the whole ‘perfect’ pangram thing) there are a number of other options available to you.
The next class of pangrams are what I choose to cal ‘standard’ pangrams. This class of pangrams once again uses each letter of an alphabet, but instead of requiring the ‘exactly once’ usage of the perfect pangram, the standard pangram allows for a more flexible ‘at least once.’ In the following list of my favorites I have, with two exceptions, excluded examples that include proper nouns, abbreviations, or acronyms / initialisms.
- Bright vixens jump; dozy fowl quack. (29 letters)
- Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. (29 letters)
- How quickly daft jumping zebras vex. (30 letters)
- The five boxing wizards jump quickly. (31 letters)
- My jocks box, get hard, unzip, quiver, flow. (32 letters) [I, er, um.]
- Kvetching, flummoxed by job, W. zaps Iraq. (32 letters) (Includes proper noun) [Ahem.]
- Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. (32 letters) [Wahoo!]
- A wizard’s job is to vex chumps quickly in fog. (36 letters)
- Watch “Jeopardy!”, Alex Trebek’s fun TV quiz game. (37 letters) (Includes proper noun, includes abbreviation)
- Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes. (40 letters)
And so on and so forth. Feel free to peruse the whole list yourself. If you come up with one that isn’t represented there, please share it in a comment here! I’d love to add to my collection.
Finally, we encounter the phonetic pangram. As indicated by the name, a phonetic pangram focuses on the discrete phonemes in a language, as opposed to the actual characters. These are a bit more tricky to nail down, because every speaker uses a slightly different subset of the overall set of phonemes in a language. This variance helps constitute the wide array of accents with which people speak. However, assuming a common baseline, the following is an example of a phonetic pangram for the English language:
“The beige hue on the waters of the loch impressed all, including the French queen, before she heard that symphony again, just as young Arthur wanted.” (a phonetic, not merely phonemic, pangram created by Ollie Sayeed. It contains both nasals [m]and [ɱ] (as in ‘symphony’), the fricatives [x] (as in ‘loch’) and [ç] (as in ‘hue’), the ‘dark L’ [ɫ] (as in ‘all’), and the unvoiced labio-velar approximant [ʍ] (as in ‘queen’))
You really have to start being something of a linguistics nerd to really appreciate the intricacy involved with constructing a complete phonetic pangram such as this. (Personally, I spent a couple of semesters trying to be a linguistics major. I ended up having to change majors because I discovered that I simply could not hear many of the phonemes that my professors insisted were obvious to the naked ear. I attribute this to having spent much of my early childhood concentrating on the Japanese language instead of English.)
Why the hell would you ever need to know a pangram? Chances are, most of you won’t. However, if you spend any amount of time working with typography – and I know I have a couple of font nerd friends out there – you’ll probably want to see examples of text that allow for a reasonable representation of what you might see on the screen for any given character. And, you want to see those characters in use, in actual words, as opposed to simply lined up with all their symbolic brethren. And, you probably won’t want to have to dig through to find that exact section of lorem ipsum that actually contains all the letters you want. Enter the pangram. Or, as is my habit, enter a whole slew of them.
I keep all of the reasonable pangram examples from the Wikipedia page strung together, stored in a text file. When I’m working on picking a new font for a project, and I want to compare and contrast, I pull up this text file and simply change the font for the whole document to one of my candidates. I make as many copies as I need in order to perform meaningful comparisons. Much like lorem ipsum, this lets me see a great deal of text in one place. However, unlike lorem ipsum, I’m guaranteed that the entire lowercase alphabet is represented. And, with some work, and selecting the appropriate 26 examples, I’ve also included a collection pangrams that contain each letter in its upper case form at least once, so those characters are represented as well. Unfortunately, pangrams (and lorem ipsum, for that matter) are unlikely to include much in the way of punctuation beyond a comma or an apostrophe or hyphen, and nothing in the way of numbers. So, I include addresses, phone numbers, and web addresses – as well as the boring old simply lineup of those characters – in my sample text block. (Nothing is worse than deciding on a central font for use on a project and then discovering that you absolutely hate the forward-slash or exclamation point.)
But, if you don’t have any typography needs at hand, pangrams are also a decent way to practice your typing skills. This is, in fact, where most of us of a certain age, encountered the fox and the dog, once upon a time. You know, back when schools actually offered typing classes, and infants weren’t born with an innate knowledge of QWERTY? Finally, trying to come up with your own pangram constructs is a fun mental exercise, if you’re into that sort of thing. And, if you’ve actually made it to the end of this article, I’m going to have to assume you are.
