Pangram

A pangram, or holoalphabetic sentence, phrase, or word, is a sentence, phrase, or word using every letter of a given alphabet at least once. Pangrams have been used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and typing.

Origins

Font preview software using the English pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" to demonstrate the typeface Bitstream Vera Sans at different sizes.

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 and was used by Western Union to test Telex/TWX data communication equipment for accuracy and reliability. Pangrams like this are now used by a number of computer programs to display computer typefaces.

Short pangrams

Short pangrams in English are more difficult to devise, and may require uncommon words or unlikely sentences. Longer pangrams afford more opportunity for clever or humorous turns of phrase.

The following table lists several pangrams of 35 letters or fewer that use no abbreviations or proper nouns:

Pangram	Number of words	Number of letters	Repeated letters	Refs
Quick nymph bugs vex fjord waltz.	6	27	U
Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex.	7	28	A, I
Glib jocks quiz nymph to vex dwarf.	7	28	I, O
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!	7	29	A, O, U
How quickly daft jumping zebras vex!	6	30	A, E, I, U
The five boxing wizards jump quickly.	6	31	E, I, U
Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.	7	31	A, I, O
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.	8	32	E, I, O, U
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.	9	35	E, H, O, R, T, U

Perfect pangrams

A perfect pangram contains every letter of the alphabet only once; as such, it is an anagram of the alphabet. The only known perfect pangrams of the English alphabet use abbreviations or other non-dictionary words, such as "Blowzy night-frumps vex'd Jack Q." or "Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx." or they include words so obscure that the phrase is challenging to understand, such as "Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz", in which is a loan word from Welsh meaning an amphitheatre-like glaciated depression, vext is an uncommon way to spell vexed, and quiz is used in an archaic sense to mean a puzzling or eccentric person. Taken together, it means "Symbols in the bowl-like depression on the edge of a long steep sea inlet confused an eccentric person".

Other writing systems may present more options: The Iroha is a well-known perfect pangram of the Japanese syllabary, while the Hanacaraka is a perfect pangram for the Javanese script and is commonly used to order its letters in sequence.

Other languages

Using the Latin script

Whereas the English language uses all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet in native and naturalized words, many other languages using the same alphabet do not. Pangram writers in these languages are forced to choose between only using those letters found in native words or incorporating exotic loanwords into their pangrams. Some words, such as the Gaelic-derived whisk(e)y, which has been borrowed by many languages and uses the letters k, w and y, are frequent fixtures of many foreign pangrams.

There are also languages that use other Latin characters that do not appear in the traditional 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. This differs further from English pangrams, with letters such as ç, ä, and š.

Azerbaijani

Zafar, take your jacket and cap, it will be very cold tonight

At the night kind dragon wrapped in paper the rifle of the envious hunter

Czech

A horse that was too yellow moaned devilish odes

The most commonly used one, especially to test alphabet support with fonts. This sentence includes all Czech letters with diacritics, but not all basic letters.

May the sinful saxophones of devils echo through the hall with dreadful melodies of waltz, tango and quickstep

Used to include all basic letters, including letters that only occur in loanwords (g, q, w, x).

Danish

Tall shy groom won naughty sexquiz on wc

A perfect pangram, using every letter exactly once (including the more unusual letters as q, w, and x, and including the Danish æ, ø, and å)

Dutch

Dad's wise lynx piously looked at the sizable aqueduct

Esperanto

Maybe every quasi-fitting bungle-choir makes a human type happy

According to Ludwig Zamenhof, fresh Czech food with spices tastes good

Echo-changes every Thursday

Doesn't contain every letter but contains all accented letters.

Estonian

This little miller can jump on a train

Ewe

Have a nice birthday tonight, it's been a long time no see, it's been a while since we were in school.
Good afternoon, yes, see you again at twelve o'clock in the morning.

A two-part pangram consisting of a statement and response.

Filipino

The vulture is the one who hit Mister Judas.

Hi Roxas, aren't you and Victoria leaving Quezon and going to Naga? Are you going to check out the Peñafrancia? If so don't bring Juan.

Finnish

Although difficult to translate because of its non-practical use, it roughly means a whinge of a sleazy lover

A perfect pangram not using any of the special letters used in Finnish only for foreign words (b, c, f, q, š, w, x, z, ž, å)

Albert bought a bassoon and blew a puffing tune

An imperfect pangram not using some of the special letters used in Finnish only for foreign words (q, w, x, z, å) but which makes perfect everyday sense.

It is rather fun that bicycles are a daily phenomenon on the countryroads

An imperfect pangram not containing the previously mentioned special letters.

A/the Viennese rich zombie who can speak Sioux likes Åsa's Roquefort tacos

Contains all the letters of the Finnish alphabet.

French

Take this old whisky to the blond judge who is smoking

Uses each basic consonant once, though not any letters with diacritics.

The naive, hasty aegithales who lay eggs at Christmas when it's freezing are sure to be disappointed when they see their funny eggs damaged

Contains the letters with diacritics, including ÿ (only found in place names) as well as the ligature letters œ (common in French) and æ (only used in loanwords).

German

Victor chases twelve boxers across the Great Levee of Sylt

Contains all letters, including the umlauted vowels (ä, ö, ü) and ß. The letter y is limited to loanwords and proper names like Sylt.

Hungarian

An unfaithful son-in-law paints by a sniveling, angry Mexican lord at Wesselényi's in Quito

Contains all letters of the Hungarian alphabet, including exclusively foreign X, Q, and W, for a total of 64 letters.

Icelandic

If a new axe were here, thieves would feel increasing deterrence and punishment

Contains all 32 letters in the Icelandic alphabet including the vowels with diacritics (á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, and ö) as well as the letters ð, þ, and æ.

Indonesian

Muharjo is a universal xenophobic who fears the peninsula residents, such as Qatar

Contains all 26 letters in the Indonesian alphabet, including the foreign letters f, q, v, x and z.

The Quran reciter figure gives the xylophone expert a ride on the tour guide's moped.

Contains all 26 letters in the Indonesian alphabet. It also contains only words that are in the Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia.

Irish

A large black cat ate the rotten fish promptly

Has 31 letters and includes all 18 letters found in native Irish words, but does not include the accented á, í, or ú, nor the non-accented e.

A maiden of large appetite with an intensely white, dense spade went through the hat of my good little porker

Uses 64 letters and includes all 18 letters found in native Irish words plus all vowels with and without accents.

If written with old-style poncanna séimhithe—

—it uses 54 letters and also shows every letter capable of lenition with and without a dot.

Jesus, Son of the blessed Virgin, redeemed the seed of Eve and Adam

Has 58 letters and shows all 18 letters found in native Irish words. Shows all accented vowels as capitals.

Italian

A lunch of water makes twisted faces

has 26 letters and includes all 21 letters found in native Italian words. It does not include the five letters which are only found in loanwords: j, k, w, y, and x.

Kurdish

There were more than four beautiful flowers near the filthy Feqo

Has 42 letters and includes all 31 letters found in Kurdish words. This pangram was created by Îrec Mêhrbexş in 2023.

Malay

Muzafar often prayed and read the Quran while studying at the University of Oxford.

Contains all 26 letters in the Malay Latin alphabet.

Norwegian

Strange golfplayer with club won sexquiz on wc in hometown

Polish

Make the ego yellow with a gusle

Contains all diactrics, but not every letter and is mainly used to test font support.

Push a hedgehog or eight crates of figs in this boat

Most commonly used, perfect pangram, archaic spelling of .

Be brave, protect your regiment and six flags

Another pangram in common use.

The watchman pushed the bone/dice into a quiz of the musics or a fax of the washes

A perfect pangram containing all letters, including those used only in loan words: q, v, x.

Portuguese

I see a sexy hunk forcibly stuff fifteen kiwis into a shallow trunk.

Uses all diacritics and all 23 letters from the Portuguese alphabet (before the Orthographic Agreement of 1990; the letters k, w, and y are found mainly in loanwords).

I see a hobbler yelling that he performed the show without playback.

Uses all letters from the Portuguese alphabet (including the letters k, w, and y), but no diacritics. Loans the word show from the english language.

Romanian

[I'm] still selling jam, beige whisky, and pink tequila, [with a] fixed price.

Contains all letters, including Romanian diacritics: ă, â, î, ș, and ț. The letters q, w, and y were introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982 with the first DOOM dictionary. They are used for loan words such as quodlibet, watt, and yoga. The letter k is also rarely used, mainly for names and international neologisms such as kilogram and folk.

Serbian

A kind lamplighter with a sooty face wants to show me a prank.

Can equally be written in gajica.

Spanish

Benjamin ordered a kiwi and strawberry drink. Noah, without shame, the most exquisite champagne on the menu

Uses all diacritics and the foreign letters k and w.

The quick Indian bat was happily eating cardillo and kiwi. The stork was playing the saxophone behind the straw palenque.

Contains 2 sentences and 92 letters; it is used in Microsoft Windows operating system if the language is set to Spanish (Español).

Slovak

A flock of happy woodpeckers by the mouth of the river Váh is teaching a silent horse to nibble on bark and feed on fresh meat

Missing f, g, j, l, q, w, x, y, as well as the accented vowel ó.

Swedish

Flying snipes seek rest on soft tussocks

Missing q, x and z. Uses archaic spellings.

Axe killer Julia Blomqvist on fencing in Switzerland

Uses the name "Julia Blomqvist" and the Swedish name for Switzerland.

Switzerland brings luxury feather on branch behind oven

Feels quite contrived. The duplicated letters spell out serif.

FAQ about Switzerland: Did you cleave a narrow village of ski boots?

Uses the English abbreviation FAQ alongside some made-up compounds.

Axe-handle carrier, give our WC zone-maiden IQ support

Uses the English abbreviation IQ alongside two made up compounds.

God help Zorn's maiden quickly get her pants off

Uses both old-fashioned spelling and the dialectal form byx.

Foal without pants went to the dove show

Missing q and z.

Tamajeq

xa bălla imuzărăn naŋŋin wər gəmmiyăn âr taggaẓt dəɣ Məššina fəl ad agəẓ ṭǝma n ăɣrǝm han măqqăja săkṣoḍnen.

Toki Pona

The person gives you food

Contains all the letters found in core words. It is commonly used to test constructed writing systems.

Turkish

The sick person in pyjamas quickly trusted the swarthy driver

Contains all of the letters in the Turkish alphabet.

Welsh

I didn't park my least favourite pink fabric car and my magical digger full of bitter water by Mabon's house on Tuesday, but I parked it in a rusty lagoon

Uses all the letters of the Welsh alphabet including the loan letter j.

Vietnamese

My countryside school is built thoroughly by my father, so it's very clean and pretty

A more grammatically correct form of , and contains all the letters and diacritics of the Vietnamese alphabet.

Other alphabetic scripts

Non-Latin alphabetic or phonetic scripts such as Greek, Armenian, and others can also have pangrams. In some writing systems, exactly what counts as a distinct symbol can be debated. For example, many languages have accents or other diacritics, but one might count "é" and "e" as the same for pangrams. A similar problem arises for older English orthography that includes the long s ("ſ").

Arabic

Wise text with a decisive secret and great significance, written on a green cloth and wrapped in blue leather

Armenian

The Chinese physicist treats the swollen left arm of the Armenian colonel by spraying it with soapwater

Belarusian

In Iwye, a thin, lively devil in a green vest ran to eat minced meat with soup

I will brutally kill this flowery profile that walks by my house straight to the heart

Bulgarian

Under a southern tree, blooming in blue, ran a little fluffy bunny

For a moment I was in an unfamiliar squeaky plush armchair

Oh, wonderful Bulgarian land, whirl blooming wheats!

Hey, Valyo the guard is pretending to watch, but he's secretly eating meatballs behind the crates!

Burmese

A wise wizard from Ceylon took on a commitment and explicitly read the recipe for the elixir of life on the almond tree beside the Zalun Market

Georgian

We were overcome by smoke, the birds were carried away by chirping in the sky, sleep is disturbed by the clatter of glasses on the ground

Hebrew

Kazakhstan is a beautiful country, full of tears

A bunny ate some lettuce-flavored carrots, and he had enough

A man with a beard flew to France and fished with a fishing pole

That's how the explosives fell on the little chick that pushed Tzvi into the water

A curious fish swimming in the sea is disappointed and suddenly finds a friend

There is also a version with every niqqud included (with repetitions) except the Sin dot:

A "dust bat" escaped through the air conditioner, which exploded due to the heat

Punjabi (Shahmukhi)

Seen across the mountains of salvation, the enchanted hail of darkness.
Then, at the cave of Hira's mound, the news was spread in all directions.
A wise and powerful one embraced the path of a faqir.
With smiles and resounding calls,
With responsibility,the fruit of patience was shared, and gains of love,
Which is the essence of the entire message.

Punjabi Shahmukhi pangram, written by Akhter Mehmood

Persian

As a result of such comprehensive indoctrination and brainwashing, the level and some people's minds, understanding, and opinions are turned upside-down and reversed.

Russian

Eat some more of these soft French pastries and drink some tea

Most commonly used. Its variation is used by Windows FontView.

Would a citrus live in the jungles of the south? Yes, but a fake specimen!

This pangram is used by GNOME.

Thai

Mr. Sangkhaphant Hengpithakfang – an elderly man who earns a living by selling bottles – was arrested for prosecution by police because he stole Lady Chatchada Chansamat's watch

Contains all the letters in the Thai alphabet, both obsolete and non-obsolete.

Ukrainian

Echidna, hooded crow, hedgehog and also hissing reptiles are crossing Yangtze in a rush

Urdu

No more hailstorms, no more sunshine, No moonlight flickers in the night.
No goblets raised, no rain of fire — A strange new way of perishing is in sight.
Sweetness is lost, wit is annoyed, Every passion weakened, no fear, no fright.
The only fruit now is the name of the Beloved — This, Urfi, is all you have left in this life.

Urdu pangram written by Syed Irfan Urfi

Non-alphabetic scripts

Logographic scripts, or writing systems such as Chinese that do not use an alphabet but are composed principally of logograms, cannot produce pangrams in a literal sense (or at least, not pangrams of reasonable size). The total number of signs is large and imprecisely defined, so producing a text with every possible sign is practically impossible. However, various analogies to pangrams are feasible, including traditional pangrams in a romanization.

In Japanese, although typical orthography uses kanji (logograms), pangrams can be made using every kana, or syllabic character. The Iroha is a classic example of a perfect pangram in non-Latin script.

In Chinese, the Thousand Character Classic is a 1000-character poem in which each character is used exactly once; however, it does not include all Chinese characters. The single character (permanence) incorporates all the basic strokes used to write Chinese characters, using each stroke exactly once, as described in the Eight Principles of Yong.

Among abugida scripts, an example of a perfect pangram is the Hanacaraka (hana caraka; data sawala; padha jayanya; maga bathanga) of the Javanese script, which is used to write the Javanese language in Indonesia.

Bengali

On the nineteenth of Kartik, at eight-thirty o’clock at night, Ejaz Mia, a small-loan-indebted, destitute, old farmer residing in Bhairab, despite having medicine at hand, out of fear of that loan, seeing blurry-eyed and trembling slightly from the pain in his chest, collapsed onto the grey-coloured mat spread in the courtyard.

All 50 letters of the Bengali alphabet are present in this pangram published in Shubach Little Mag. This sentence consists of all vowels, vowel diacritics, and consonants, but does not contain all conjunct consonants.

Korean

Squirrels ride on the old wheel.

Microsoft Windows uses this phrase to test Korean fonts, which uses all of the basic Hangul consonants but not all of the vowels.

The unique conditions of a kiss are to meet the lips and do not require any special skills.

This example pangram uses all 24 basic letters.

Sanskrit

Sanskrit pangrams focus on consonants alone, since Sandhi rules make it extremely difficult to create a pangram showing vowels distinctly.

Earthen pots and conches hold water.
Stupid imposters don't serve the truth.
Herds of pigs play with their tails.
Stormy winds blow gustily through the fences.

The above has been composed by Saurabh B, in the उपेन्द्रवज्रा (Upēndravajrā) meter, and contains all consonants of Classical Sanskrit.

Self-enumerating pangrams

A self-enumerating pangram is a pangrammatic autogram, or a sentence that inventories its own letters, each of which occurs at least once. The first example was produced by Rudy Kousbroek, a Dutch journalist and essayist, who publicly challenged Lee Sallows, a British recreational mathematician resident in the Netherlands, to produce an English translation of his Dutch pangram. In the sequel, Sallows built an electronic "pangram machine", that performed a systematic search among millions of candidate solutions. The machine was successful in identifying the following 'magic' translation:

This pangram contains four As, one B, two Cs, one D, thirty Es, six Fs, five Gs, seven Hs, eleven Is, one J, one K, two Ls, two Ms, eighteen Ns, fifteen Os, two Ps, one Q, five Rs, twenty-seven Ss, eighteen Ts, two Us, seven Vs, eight Ws, two Xs, three Ys, & one Z.

Chris Patuzzo was able to reduce the problem of finding a self-enumerating pangram to the boolean satisfiability problem. He did this by using a made-to-order hardware description language as a stepping stone and then applied the Tseytin transformation to the resulting chip.

Pangrams in literature

The pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", and the search for a shorter pangram, are the cornerstone of the plot of the novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. The search successfully comes to an end when the phrase "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs" is discovered (which has only 6 duplicated vowels).

The scientific paper Cneoridium dumosum (Nuttall) Hooker F. Collected March 26, 1960, at an Elevation of about 1450 Meters on Cerro Quemazón, 15 Miles South of Bahía de Los Angeles, Baja California, México, Apparently for a Southeastward Range Extension of Some 140 Miles has a pangrammatic title.

See also

• Panalphabetic window
• Pangrammatic window
• Pangrammatic lipogram
• Pandigital number, the same idea for integers in a given base
• Template:Annotated link
• Template:Annotated link
• Template:Annotated link
• Music written in all major or minor keys
• Template:Annotated link
• Template:Annotated link

Further reading

• Rutter, Richard (30 October 2014). "List of pangrams". Clagnut. Retrieved 2026-03-13.

External links

• Pangram Finder at Wordsmith.org
• Fun With Words: Pangrams at RinkWorks