Pangram Hall of Fame
"The quick brown fox ..." gives us a decent pangram at just 35 letters. But that leaves us asking: OK, so the fox jumps over a dog. So what? Can we say something more engaging?
Here are some of my favorite pangrams that, in just a few words, say something interesting and coherent -- no translation or explanation needed.
Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes.
40 letters
Intoxicated Queen Elizabeth vows Mickey Jagger is perfection.
53 letters
Self-Referential Pangrams
Here's a pangram that loves to talk about itself.
This sentence has all letters, including b, f, j, k, m, o, p, q, v, w, x, y, and z.
50 letters
Pangrams are the zany, jolly, quirky sets of words boxed in creativity.
57 letters, by Suzanne Heymann
57 letters
Self-Enumerating Pangram
A pangram that lists its inventory:
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.
182 letters, by Lee Sallow, 1983
Perfect Pangrams
The holy (wholly!) grail of pangrams is one that uses exactly as many letters as in the alphabet: a perfect pangram. For English, that would be a 26-letter pangram. No letters wasted. The problem is that as a pangram approaches its critical mass, it tends to lose its coherence (you can't have everything in life). Pushing the boundaries (or stretching the limits) requires sacrificing lucidity, at least in the pangram world.
Pictographs on the bank of a mountain basin irked the eccentric person.
Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx.
Know of a pangram that belongs here? Send it to (words at wordsmith.org).