What is a pangram?
A pangram is a short sentence containing all 26 letters of the alphabet. Some reserve the term for sentences containing exactly 26 letters, sometimes referred to as perfect pangrams. By our definition of an anagram, all letters must be used once and only once, so only a 26-letter pangram is an anagram of the English alphabet. The most well-known pangrams are these: • The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog. • Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. • The five boxing wizards jump quickly. Each is shorter than the last, but letters are still repeated. To arrive at a perfect pangram, the use of obscure foreign words and abbreviations is often required, as seen in these examples: • TV quiz drag nymph blew JFK’s cox. • Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz. Where ‘cwm’ is Welsh for a circular valley, a glyph is a carved figure, ‘vext’ is a poetic spelling of ‘vexed’, and a quiz is an 18th century term for an eccentric. Thus, ‘carved figures in a valley on a bank of a fjord irritated an eccentr
