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Pangram

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A pangram (Greek: pan gramma, "every letter"), or holoalphabetic sentence, is a sentence which uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. Pangrams are used to display typefaces and test typewriters. The best-known pangram in English is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".

Interesting pangrams are generally short ones; constructing a sentence that includes the fewest repeat letters possible is a challenging task. Longer pangrams that are enlightening, humorous, or eccentric can be noteworthy in their own right. In a sense, the pangram is the opposite of the lipogram, where the aim is to omit one or more letters.

Contents

Examples in English

The shortest known pangram found naturally occuring in literature (although not the whole sentence), according to the February 2006 edition of , is in Lillie de Hagermann-Lindencrone's 1912 book In the Courts of Memory: "I sang, and thought I sang very well; but he just looked up into my face with a very quizzical expression, and said, 'How long have been singing, Mademoiselle?'" at 56 letters.

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.

Self-enumerating pangrams

A self-enumerating pangram is one which describes exactly the number of letters it itself contains. Because changing the description changes the numbers of letters used in the description, the task of finding such a pangram is exceedingly complex.

This particularly interesting kind of pangram arose from some verbal horseplay between Douglas Hofstadter, an AI researcher and writer for Scientific American, Rudy Kousbroek, a Dutch linguist and essayist, and Lee Sallows, a British electronics engineer. Hofstadter posed the problem of sentences that describe themselves, prompting Sallows to devise the following:

Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sixteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !.
This, while interesting, is not a complete pangram as it lacks a j, q, and z. Kousbroek published a Dutch equivalent, which spurred Sallows, who lives in the Netherlands and reads the paper where Kousbroek writes his essays, to think harder about this problem in order to solve it more generally. Initial attempts to write a program for this came to naught, but, in 1984, he decided to construct a dedicated piece of hardware for this task, the Pangram Machine. This accepts a description of the initial sentence fragment, and tries to fill in the blanks. The result was later published in Scientific American in October of 1984, as follows:

This Pangram contains four a's, one b, two c's, one d, thirty e's, six f's, five g's, seven h's, eleven i's, one j, one k, two l's, two m's, eighteen n's, fifteen o's, two p's, one q, five r's, twenty-seven s's, eighteen t's, two u's, seven v's, eight w's, two x's, three y's, & one z.
(Lee Sallows, 1984)[link]

Other languages

All letters

Only letters with diacritical marks

A variant tries to make a word or phrase containing at least all letters with diacritical marks:

Ideographic scripts

Uses of pangrams

Pangrams are used for a number of purposes other than games. For example, the pangram The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog was developed by Western Union to test Telex/TWX data communication equipment for accuracy and reliability. Also, like lorem ipsum, pangrams are often used to display how a certain font will appear.

Computing application

Pangrams are often used to test new fonts and printers, because every letter of the alphabet is represented. It can also be used as a simple text substitution, like lorem ipsum.

External links

 

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