Wordology, Pangram

A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter in the alphabet. The name comes from two Greek root words. “Pan” means “all,” and “gram” means “something written.” Together, they mean all written letters.

The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
The five boxing wizards jump quickly.

A pangram must be a full sentence. That means it needs to include a subject and a predicate. A “perfect pangram” uses each letter from the alphabet only once.

Alphabet Facts

The word alphabet is derived from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. We owe our own alphabet to the Phoenicians. Their 22 letter alphabet had no vowels, but it was used as the basis of the ancient Greek alphabet, which in turn was adapted by the Romans, and is essentially the same as the one we use today.

A sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet is called a pangram.



Ernest Vincent Wright's novel Gadsby: Champion of Youth (1939) - a story of more than 50,000 words in which the letter ‘e’ never appears. George Perec’s novel La Disparition (1969) which doesn’t contain the letter ‘e’. Its English translation, A Void by Gilbert Adair, also avoids using the letter ‘e’ which is the most common letter in both languages.