The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
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"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is a pangram that has been used to test typewriters and computer keyboards because it is coherent, short, and contains all the letters of the English alphabet. It was often used for testing the teletype services (a procedure known as "foxing") when these machines were still used. In the age of computers, it is often used as a sample text in font selection contexts.
The phrase is frequently misquoted as "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", which does not contain all the letters of the alphabet since it lacks the letter "s". For this reason, the word "slow" or "sleeping" is sometimes inserted into the phrase, or the word "dog" is made plural.
Computer usage
The phrase has been used by Microsoft to display fonts since the original release of Microsoft Word, resulting in enormous world-wide exposure to it. In addition to being short and intelligible, it has also been chosen by many others since it describes a neutral, bland event which is unlikely to offend anyone.
In Windows 95 or higher, the sentence was changed to "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890", which also tests numbers. When opening a font under Windows XP, built-in font viewer shows "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890" or "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz. 1234567890", depending on the font being viewed.
Alternative phrases
Localized versions of Microsoft Windows use different sample texts when viewing local language fonts, except the Romanian language and Brazilian Portuguese language versions, which translates the phrase literally despite the fact that the resulting translation ("Agera vulpe maronie sare peste câinele cel leneş." and "A ligeira raposa marrom ataca o cão preguiçoso." respectively) is not a pangram.In the case of CJK Windows, the localized phrases are not pangrams:
| Localized message | translation | |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | 視野無限廣，窗外有藍天 | Infinite field of view, outside window is blue sky |
| Windows 興國安邦，巨擘八方！ | (in Windows XP) | |
The phrase "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country" has also been used to test the skills of typists, but it is not a pangram.
Trivia
- In the novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, the inventor of the phrase lives on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina.
- In the novel The Dark Half by Stephen King, the psychotic writer George Stark almost goes on a rampage through a public library when he discovers in the library's typing room that he has a form of writer's block featuring the pangram. No matter what he tries to type, his fingers end up typing the phrase, over and over again.
- The phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" can be generated 15 times in the English Microsoft Word by typing =rand() and pressing the ENTER key. N paragraphs each containing the phrase M times can be generated by typing =rand(N,M) and pressing the ENTER key, where N and M are entered as the desired numbers. For example =rand(2,3) creates 2 paragraphs with each paragraph repeating the phrase 3 times. The maximum possible value is 140.
- A card was made in the card game with a flavor text quote "The quick onyx goblin jumps over the lazy dwarf." (Also a pangram.) The card was called "Now I know my ABC's", and was itself a joke card from Magic's Unhinged series, a set of all humorous and nonsense cards not actually meant for serious play.
- The phrase appears in a song in the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
- In the "Peanuts" comics by Charles M. Schulz the phrase is often typed by Snoopy acting as if he was a "Famous Writer".
See also
External links
- [Sentences that contain all letters commonly used in a language]
- [List of English sentences that contain all letters of the alphabet]
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