Pangrams: Sentences That Use Every Letter of the Alphabet
A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. The most famous is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Pangrams have a practical history: typists, telegraph operators and font designers have long used them to show every letter in one short line. They are also a satisfying puzzle to write.
Classic pangrams
Each of these uses all 26 letters. We have counted the letters in each:
| Pangram | Letters |
|---|---|
| The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog | 35 |
| Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs | 32 |
| The five boxing wizards jump quickly | 31 |
| Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz | 31 |
| How vexingly quick daft zebras jump | 30 |
| Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow | 29 |
The fox sentence is the best known, but it is not the most efficient: at 35 letters it repeats several. The shorter ones below waste fewer letters.
Perfect pangrams
A perfect pangram uses each of the 26 letters exactly once, so the sentence is exactly 26 letters long. They are extremely hard to write and usually need abbreviations or unusual words. A well-known example is "Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx", which is exactly 26 letters. Another near-perfect one, "Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex", uses 28.
Why the hard letters appear together
Look at any pangram and you will see J, Q, X and Z crammed in close, often in words like QUICK, QUARTZ, JUMP, ZEBRA and LYNX. Those four letters are the rarest in English, so a pangram writer has to build the sentence around them first, then fill in the common letters, which look after themselves.
Write your own
- Start with the rare letters. Choose words that cover J, Q, X and Z early, such as QUARTZ, JInX or ZEBRA.
- Add the other less-common letters next: K, V, W, Y, B, F.
- Fill in with common letters. By now you likely have most of A, E, I, O, N, R, S and T already.
- Check your work. Write out the alphabet and tick off each letter as you find it.
A game to try
Challenge someone to write the shortest pangram they can in five minutes, then compare. It is harder than it looks and a good way to think about which letters are rare. For related wordplay, see our guides to palindromes and the longest words in English.
Related reading: Palindromes · Longest words in English
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