What Is a Pangram?

A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. It is a word game, and also a practical tool: type designers, signwriters and teachers use pangrams because they show all the letters of a script in a compact, readable line.

Common English pangrams

Each of these was checked by counting distinct letters, and all four contain every one of the 26 letters of the English alphabet. The letter count column is the number of alphabetic characters in the sentence, so the closer to 26, the less repetition there is.

A perfect pangram uses each letter exactly once. Examples exist, such as “Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx”, but they usually need abbreviations, rare words or proper names, and the result reads like a puzzle, not a sentence. For lettering practice, perfect pangrams are less useful than a natural one.

Why designers use pangrams

When you design a typeface, you need to see all the letters together as soon as possible, because the shapes depend on each other. A pangram is the cheapest way to do it. A good specimen sentence has:

• Every letter, so no glyph is left untested.
• A mix of tall, round and straight letters, so rhythm and kerning show up.
• Common word shapes, so the text reads as language, not a code.

The classic fox sentence includes the uncommon letters q, z, j, x and k, which are exactly the ones that designers must not forget. In specimen sheets and font preview boxes, you will often see one pangram at several sizes, so you can judge the x-height and weight. For decorative faces, a display font preview may use a short pangram in huge letters to show off its capitals.

Pangrams in handwriting and lettering practice

A pangram makes a better drill than “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz” because you see letters in context, next to varied neighbours. A simple routine:

1. Write one pangram in your chosen style, on a ruled line.
2. Circle the three letters that feel worst: wobbly q, collapsing z or inconsistent k.
3. Redraw those letters in isolation, five times each.
4. Write the sentence again and compare.

In cursive, pangrams reveal weak joins. The x and z at the end of “lynx” or “quartz” show how you handle endings, while qu tests an awkward connection. Our cursive sentences page shows how sentences look when written in school cursive, and the cursive text generator gives you a quick preview of each pangram in a Unicode script.

Pangrams and fancy text

Fancy text generators are a good place to use a pangram, because a style may support some letters and not others. Small caps lacks a proper x, and a few styles are missing letters or digits. Pasting a pangram into the small caps generator shows every substitution at a glance. For example, the quick fox sentence will show the Unicode look-alike for q and a normal x, which is a quick way to find the limits of a style.

Pangrams in other languages

Pangrams exist for every alphabetic language. They get harder where an alphabet is larger or has many accented letters. For languages with diacritics, a full pangram may need to include the accented forms to be counted as complete, so one that covers French or Polish usually includes characters beyond the 26 basic Latin letters. See diacritic for how accents are encoded.

Common confusions

• A pangram is not a perfect pangram. Repeats are allowed in a pangram; none are allowed in a perfect one.
• A pangram is not an anagram of the alphabet. It is a sentence, not a rearrangement.
• Lorem ipsum is not a pangram. It is placeholder text that does not use every letter.