Pangram

A pangram (Greek: παν γράμμα, pan gramma, "every letter"), or holoalphabetic sentence, is a sentence using every letter of the alphabet at least once. Pangrams have been used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and keyboarding. Some examples:

• in English, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" (all 26 letters).
• in German, "Victor jagt zwölf Boxkämpfer quer über den Sylter Deich" (every umlaut).
• in French, "Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume" (all 26 letters).
• in Spanish, "El veloz murciélago hindú comía feliz cardillo y kiwi. La cigüeña tocaba el saxofón detrás del palenque de paja." (all 27 letters and diacritics).

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.^[1] 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.

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 dog'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 scales which include every common note in a particular musical key.

Ideographic scripts

Ideographic scripts, that is, writing systems composed principally of logograms, cannot be used to produce pangrams in the literal sense, since they are radically different from alphabets or other phonetic writing systems. 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.

• Chinese:
  • The Thousand Character Classic is a one-thousand-character poem in which each character is used exactly once, but it does not include all Chinese characters.
  • The single character 永 (permanence) incorporates every basic stroke used to write Chinese characters exactly once, as described in the Eight Principles of Yong.

Self-enumerating pangrams

A self-enumerating pangram, or a pangrammic autogram, 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:

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 diagrams.

Cultural references

The novel Ella Minnow Pea 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.

See also

• List of pangrams in numerous languages
• Pangrammatic window
• Pangrammatic lipogram
• Lorem ipsum
• Heterogram
• Iroha
• Isogram

References

1. ^ "Fun with Words: Pangrams"