Pangram

A pangram is a sentence or phrase which contains all the letters of the alphabet of the language in which it is written. The word comes from the Greek πᾶν (pan, all, every) and γράμμα (gramma, letter). An alternative expression for a pangran is a holoalphabetic sentence (or phrase).

The best known English pangram is 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog': it contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet. Other languages have different alphabets, and pangrams in those languages must contain all the letters of the appropriate alphabet. Thus the Italian pangram Pranzo d'acqua fa volti sghembi ('A dinner of water produces twisted faces') contains all 21 letters of the Italian alphabet - the Italian alphabet lacks the letters 'j', 'k', 'w', 'x', and 'y', which occur in the language only in loan words.

The construction of pangrams may be thought to be no more than a linguistic game, the object being to construct the shortest, or most amusing, sentence containing all the letters of the relevant alphabet, and the ideal being a pangram in which each letter occurs only once. However, pangrams also have serious uses: they may be used to test certain skills (e.g., keyboard skills) and certain types of equipment (e.g., Telex equipment). The pangram 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' has been used for these purposes since the end of the nineteenth century.

For other types of 'constrained writing' see Lipogram, Tautogram, and Rhopalic sentence..