One Word: Pangram

You all know I love anagrams – those wonderful phrases created by rearranging the letters of one thing to spell something else.

Like when I scramble the letters of “Gary Leland Matthews” to spell “sadly elegant warmth” (and lots of other things – most of them unflattering but hilarious).

Until a few days ago, however, I didn’t know what a pangram is! Should I be ashamed? Probably – wordplay is my game and I’m supposed to know these things.

But I’m having too much fun with pangrams to care. Here’s the scoop:

A pangram is any phrase or sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet, at least once. Any letter can occur more than once, but it must be at least once.

The best-known pangram is “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.” This 33-letter sentence uses every letter at least once, and some – such as “a” and “o” – more often.

Many people mistype this pangram as “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” It’s still a pangram – simply a longer one (now 35 letters).

To my dismay, I realized, upon looking this one up, that I’ve been doing worse: For most of my life I’ve been typing it as “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” Not only is that version longer still, it isn’t even a pangram. It’s missing the “s”.

Pangrams not only are fun – they can be useful: (1) Ever since keyboards were invented, the “quick brown fox” sentence has been used for testing them. (2) It makes a great typing exercise. (3) Font designers need sentences like this to illustrate their full range of alphabetic characters. (Of course, for the latter they need to print the sentence in both uppercase and lowercase.)

These practical applications require that the pangram, in addition to containing every letter, be reasonably short. In this case, 33 letters. Pangrams can be longer: “Forsaking monastic tradition, twelve jovial friars gave up their vocation for a questionable existence on the flying trapeze.” That one is 106.

Which raises a question: What is the shortest possible pangram?

Obviously any pangram, to be one, must be at least 26 letters long. Such constructions are called “perfect pangrams” – and yes, they do exist.

Before giving examples, let us note that any perfect pangram also is, by definition, a kind of anagram: an anagram of the entire alphabet!

I considered coining the word “panagram” to describe such anagrams. A web search, however, dissuaded me: It turns out this is such a common misspelling of “pangram” that it would generate more confusion than clarity.

Even the term “perfect” is relative here. Apparently it isn’t possible, in English, to compose an intelligible 26-letter pangram without using abbreviations, proper names, initials, acronyms, or the like.

Unless, that is, we use extraordinarily obscure or archaic words and foreign-language imports. Then we’d have stuff like: “Bortz waqf glyphs vex muck djin.” (This sentence, created by Ed Spargo, means that signage indicating endowments for industrial diamonds annoy filth-spreading genies.)

What about easily understood 26-letter pangrams?

One of the best, in my opinion, is: “The glib czar junks my VW Fox PDQ.” The acronym “PDQ” is slang for “pretty darn quick”, and there actually is a Volkswagen car called the Fox. It’s one of VW’s cheaper models – one that any glib czar probably would dispose of right away!

Another one I like: “New job: fix Mr. Gluck’s hazy TV, PDQ!” This one is sometimes criticized on the ground that it requires punctuation. I reply that one can’t have everything.

Both these last two examples use the same “PDQ” combination. A good one that doesn’t is: “Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx.” (At first I thought this was ungrammatical, “lynxes” being the correct plural of “lynx”. But I was wrong: either “lynx” or “lynxes” can be used as the plural form.)

My favorite perfect pangram, however, is this: “Blowzy night-frumps vex’d Jack Q.” We could quibble again: Here we have the non-standard contraction “vex’d” and the proper-name-and-initial combination.

When I first saw this one, I took it to mean Jack Q was annoyed (i.e., vexed) by frumpy women-of-the-night with flamboyant blouses. (Colorful? Loose and billowy? Tight and busty?)

I wondered next whether a woman can be both frumpy and flamboyant. It turns out, though, that this point is moot because “blowzy” doesn’t have anything to do with a woman’s blouse. At least not with this spelling. Here it denotes a rough, reddish complexion.

Most dictionaries I checked even say the same about “blousy” – that it, too, refers to complexion. That didn’t sit well with me, so I kept searching till I found a few dictionaries that do allow the latter as descriptive of a woman with an attention-getting blouse.

Until October 2014, Wikipedia had a page listing dozens of pangrams not only in English, but in a vast number of other languages. If you wanted a pangram in German, Cherokee, Esperanto, Klingon, Yoruba, or most anything else – you could find it. Other alphabets? No problem: Here were pangrams in Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and scripts you never knew existed.

Then Wikipedia deleted the page with the snooty comment: “It is mostly comprised [sic] of nonsense phrases thought up by people who apparently find this sort of thing terribly clever.” (One of these days I’ll tackle “comprised”, which this Wikipedian misuses rather egregiously.)

The good news is that this page was rescued and reposted on the wonderful website Clagnut.com, at this link: clagnut.com/blog/2380/. Our hero is Clagnut’s owner, web-typography expert Richard Rutter. (I’ve explained above why pangrams are professionally important to font designers and typographers.) Wikipedia now links to the page on his site, while taking credit for it.

All the pangrams I’ve cited above are taken from that page (thanks, Richard). Certainly none of those are original with me.

Anagram freak that I am, however, I couldn’t resist trying my hand at a full-alphabet perfect pangram. After considerable doodling, and to my own surprise, I came up with one: “Fox junk-TV GHQ bled crazy wimps.”

“GHQ” is a standard military abbreviation or acronym for “general headquarters”. The rest of this one should be fairly self-explanatory.

(This article is part of my series on words that are #worth1000pictures.)