What is "pangram"

n. A sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet, such as "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" in English.

A Pangram (, pan gramma, "every letter") or holoalphabetic sentence for a given alphabet is a sentence using every letter of the alphabet at least once. Pangrams have been used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and keyboarding.

The best known English pangram is " The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." It has been used since at least the late 19th century, was utilized by Western Union to test Telex / TWX data communication equipment for accuracy and reliability, and is now used by a number of computer programs (most notably the font viewer built into Microsoft Windows) to display computer fonts. An example in another language is , containing all letters used in German , including every umlaut (ä, ö, ü) plus the ß. It has been used since before 1800.

Short pangrams in English are more difficult to come up with and tend to use uncommon words. A perfect pangram contains every letter of the alphabet only once and can be considered an anagram of the alphabet; it is the shortest possible pangram. An example is the phrase "Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz" (, a loan word from Welsh, means a steep-sided valley, particularly in Wales). However, such examples are not usually understood even by native English speakers, and so arguably are not really English pangrams.

Here are some short pangrams using standard written English, not involving abbreviations or proper nouns:

1. "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs." (32 letters)
2. "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz." (31 letters)
3. "The five boxing wizards jump quickly." (31 letters)
4. "How vexingly quick daft zebras jump!" (30 letters)
5. "Bright vixens jump; dozy fowl quack." (29 letters)
6. "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow." (28 letters)

Longer pangrams may afford more opportunity for humor, cleverness, or thoughtfulness.

In a sense, the pangram is the opposite of the lipogram, in which the aim is to omit one or more letters.