Definition:
A sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once is a pangram. It comes from the Greek pan gramma meaning every letter. The goal of many pangram writers is to use all the letters, with as few repeats as possible, while still creating a sensible, clever, or meaningful sentence.
Perhaps the most familiar English language pangram is that typing tutor favorite (and font sampler text), "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog."
Designer Pangrams
However, The brown fox and lazy dog get quite jolly, special makeovers as I share some of my own pangram attempts, focused on crafting sentences that make sense in the world of graphic design and desktop publishing. Fifty-six letters used is the shortest I've been able to come up with so far.- Hazards to avoid: inadequate kerning, misuse of white space, and badly justified text. (70 letters)
- Lorem ipsum text prized by designers who just have to quickly fill layouts. (62 letters)
- Designers vexed by new DTPers haphazard use of just too many cool, quirky fonts. (65 letters)
- Amazingly dumb, quixotic font choices keep jumping out everywhere. (56 letters)
- Excellent DTP knowledge prized by employers having to quickly fill vacant jobs. (67 letters)
- I create five or six quite amazing desktop publishing projects every week. (62 letters)
- We love doing fancy, jazzed-up marketing brochures with QuarkXPress. (57 letters)
Also Known As: holoalphabetic sentence
Examples:
Perfect pangrams use each letter once and only once but seldom make much sense without an explanation (Junky qoph-flags vext crwd zimb). Repeating some letters while still using all of the alphabet results in more readable pangrams, such as, "My girl wove six dozen plaid jackets before she quit."
