Pangram
Encyclopedia
A pangram or holoalphabetic sentence, is a sentence using every letter of the alphabet
at least once. Pangrams have been used to display typeface
s, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting
, calligraphy
, and keyboarding. Some examples:
The quick-brown-fox pangram, which 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. The German Victor-jagt pangram, used since before 1800, contains all the letters, including the 3 umlaut letters: ä, ö, ü.
Short pangrams tend to be more interesting and more difficult to write because the English language uses some of the same letters (especially vowels) much more frequently than others. 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. A perfect pangram in the English language
contains every letter of the alphabet only once and can be considered an anagram
of the alphabet. A common example is the phrase "Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz". For more examples, see: List of pangrams.
's back" which includes an apostrophe
by adding "dog's back" to the phrase. The word "the" appears twice, although the phrase would have been shorter by writing "over lazy dogs" or such. Exercises in touch-typing have used pangrams to reach every common key on a keyboard, similar to exercises using musical scale
s which include every common note in a particular musical key.
s, cannot be used to produce pangrams in the literal sense, since they are radically different from alphabets or other phonetic writing system
s. In such scripts, the total number of signs is large and imprecisely defined, so producing a text with every possible sign is impossible. However, various analogies to pangrams are feasible, including traditional pangrams in a romanization
. In addition, it is possible to create pangrams that demonstrate certain aspects of ideographic characters.
, is one which describes exactly the number of letters it itself contains. The task of finding such a pangram is complicated because changing the description changes the numbers of letters used in the description. The most trivial discovery technique is the generate and test
technique.
This kind of pangram arose from some verbal horseplay between Douglas Hofstadter
, 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:
This 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, as Sallows called his device, accepted a description of the initial sentence fragment and tried to fill in the blanks. The result was later published in Scientific American in October 1984:
There are exhaustive lists of some self-enumerating sentences here and thus also of certain pangrams, in English, Italian and Latin. These were computed using binary decision diagram
s.
depicts a fictional country set off of the South Carolina
coast that idealizes the "Quick Brown Fox" pangram and its inventor. The tale chronicles the effects on local literature and social structure as various letters are banned from daily use by government dictum. This is a humorous and literary work told as a compilation of letters between neighbors.
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
at least once. Pangrams have been used to display typeface
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
s, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting
Handwriting
Handwriting is a person's particular & individual style of writing with pen or pencil, which contrasts with "Hand" which is an impersonal and formalised writing style in several historical varieties...
, calligraphy
Calligraphy
Calligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of fancy lettering . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...
, and keyboarding. Some examples:
- in English, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogThe quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is an English-language pangram, that is, a phrase that contains all of the letters of the alphabet. It has been used to test typewriters and computer keyboards, and in other applications involving all of the letters in the English alphabet...
" (all 26 letters). - in GermanGerman languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, "Victor jagt zwölf Boxkämpfer quer über den Sylter Deich" (every umlaut). - in FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, "Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume" (all 26 letters). - in SpanishSpanish languageSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, "El veloz murciélago hindú comía feliz cardillo y kiwi. La cigüeña tocaba el saxofón detrás del palenque de paja." (all 27 letters and diacriticDiacriticA diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
s).
The quick-brown-fox pangram, which has been used since at least the late 19th century, was utilized by Western Union
Western Union
The Western Union Company is a financial services and communications company based in the United States. Its North American headquarters is in Englewood, Colorado. Up until 2006, Western Union was the best-known U.S...
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
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
) to display computer fonts. The German Victor-jagt pangram, used since before 1800, contains all the letters, including the 3 umlaut letters: ä, ö, ü.
Short pangrams tend to be more interesting and more difficult to write because the English language uses some of the same letters (especially vowels) much more frequently than others. Longer pangrams may afford more opportunity for humor, cleverness, or thoughtfulness. In a sense, the pangram is the opposite of the lipogram
Lipogram
A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided — usually a common vowel, and frequently "E", the most common letter in the English language.Writing a lipogram is a trivial task...
, in which the aim is to omit one or more letters. A perfect pangram in the English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
contains every letter of the alphabet only once and can be considered an anagram
Anagram
An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who...
of the alphabet. A common example is the phrase "Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz". For more examples, see: List of pangrams.
Variations
Sometimes, an alternate variation of a pangram is used to include more symbols in the total. A common example is, in English, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogThe quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is an English-language pangram, that is, a phrase that contains all of the letters of the alphabet. It has been used to test typewriters and computer keyboards, and in other applications involving all of the letters in the English alphabet...
's back" which includes an apostrophe
Apostrophe
The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets...
by adding "dog's back" to the phrase. The word "the" appears twice, although the phrase would have been shorter by writing "over lazy dogs" or such. Exercises in touch-typing have used pangrams to reach every common key on a keyboard, similar to exercises using musical scale
Musical scale
In music, a scale is a sequence of musical notes in ascending and descending order. Most commonly, especially in the context of the common practice period, the notes of a scale will belong to a single key, thus providing material for or being used to conveniently represent part or all of a musical...
s which include every common note in a particular musical key.
Ideographic scripts
Ideographic scripts, that is, writing systems composed principally of logogramLogogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
s, cannot be used to produce pangrams in the literal sense, since they are radically different from alphabets or other phonetic writing system
Writing system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
s. In such scripts, the total number of signs is large and imprecisely defined, so producing a text with every possible sign is impossible. However, various analogies to pangrams are feasible, including traditional pangrams in a romanization
Romanization
In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...
. In addition, it is possible to create pangrams that demonstrate certain aspects of ideographic characters.
- ChineseChinese languageThe Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
:- The Thousand Character ClassicThousand Character ClassicThe Thousand Character Classic is a Chinese poem used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children. It contains exactly one thousand unique characters. It is said that Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty commissioned 周興嗣 to compose this poem for his prince to practice calligraphy...
is a one-thousand-character poem in which each character is used exactly once, but it does not include all Chinese characterChinese characterChinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
s. - The single character 永 (permanence) incorporates every basic stroke used to write Chinese characters exactly once, as described in the Eight Principles of YongEight Principles of YongStroke order animated and in color gradation from black to red The strokes numbered Where there are multiple numbers in an area, the strokes overlap briefly and continue from the previous number to the next....
.
- The Thousand Character Classic
Self-enumerating pangrams
A self-enumerating pangram, or a pangrammic autogramAutogram
An autogram is a self-referencing sentence that describes its content.An example autogram would be: This sentence contains only three a's, three c's, two d's, twenty-five e's, nine f's, four g's, eight h's, twelve i's, three l's, fifteen n's, nine o's, eight r's, twenty-four s's, eighteen t's, five...
, is one which describes exactly the number of letters it itself contains. The task of finding such a pangram is complicated because changing the description changes the numbers of letters used in the description. The most trivial discovery technique is the generate and test
Brute-force search
In computer science, brute-force search or exhaustive search, also known as generate and test, is a trivial but very general problem-solving technique that consists of systematically enumerating all possible candidates for the solution and checking whether each candidate satisfies the problem's...
technique.
This kind of pangram arose from some verbal horseplay between Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics...
, Rudy Kousbroek
Rudy Kousbroek
Herman Rudolf Kousbroek was a Dutch poet, translator, writer and first of all essayist. He was a prominent figure in Dutch cultural life between 1950 and 2010 and one of the most outspoken atheists in the Netherlands. In 1975 he was awarded the P.C...
(a Dutch linguist and essayist) and Lee Sallows
Lee Sallows
Lee Cecil Fletcher Sallows is a British electronics engineer known for his contributions to recreational mathematics. He is particularly noted as the inventor of golygons, self-enumerating sentences, and geomagic squares...
(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 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, as Sallows called his device, accepted a description of the initial sentence fragment and tried to fill in the blanks. The result was later published in Scientific American in October 1984:
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.
There are exhaustive lists of some self-enumerating sentences here and thus also of certain pangrams, in English, Italian and Latin. These were computed using binary decision diagram
Binary decision diagram
In the field of computer science, a binary decision diagram or branching program, like a negation normal form or a propositional directed acyclic graph , is a data structure that is used to represent a Boolean function. On a more abstract level, BDDs can be considered as a compressed...
s.
Cultural references
The novel Ella Minnow PeaElla Minnow Pea
Ella Minnow Pea is a novel by Mark Dunn, copyrighted in 2001. The full title of the hardcover version is Ella Minnow Pea: a progressively lipogramatic epistolary fable, while the paperback version is titled Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters....
depicts a fictional country set off of the South Carolina
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
coast that idealizes the "Quick Brown Fox" pangram and its inventor. The tale chronicles the effects on local literature and social structure as various letters are banned from daily use by government dictum. This is a humorous and literary work told as a compilation of letters between neighbors.
See also
- List of pangrams in numerous languages
- Pangrammatic windowPangrammatic windowA pangrammatic window is a stretch of naturally occurring text that contains all the letters in the alphabet.-Shortest examples:Until recently, the shortest known window was found in Lillie de Hegermann-Lindencrone's 1912 book In the Courts of Memory: "I sang, and thought I sang very well; but he...
- Pangrammatic lipogram
- Lorem ipsumLorem ipsumIn publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum[p] is placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the graphics elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout...
- HeterogramHeterogramA heterogram is a word, phrase, or sentence in which no letter of the alphabet occurs more than once....
- IrohaIrohaThe is a Japanese poem, probably written in the Heian era . Originally the poem was attributed to the founder of the Shingon Esoteric sect of Buddhism in Japan, Kūkai, but more modern research has found the date of composition to be later in the Heian Period. The first record of its existence...
- IsogramIsogramAn isogram is a logological term for a word or phrase without a repeating letter. It is also used by some to mean a word or phrase in which each letter appears the same number of times, not necessarily just once....