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)
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.)
- 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!")
- 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)
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
External links