A pangram or holoalphabetic sentence is a sentence using every letter of a given alphabet at least once. Pangrams have been used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and typing.
The best-known English pangram is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". [1] It has been used since at least the late 19th century [1] and was used by Western Union to test Telex/TWX data communication equipment for accuracy and reliability. [2] Pangrams like this are now used by a number of computer programs to display computer typefaces.
Short pangrams in English are more difficult to devise and tend to use uncommon words and unnatural sentences. Longer pangrams afford more opportunity for humor, cleverness, or thoughtfulness.
The following are examples of pangrams that are shorter than "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" (which has 35 letters) and use standard written English without abbreviations or proper nouns:
A perfect pangram contains every letter of the alphabet only once and can be considered an anagram of the alphabet. The only perfect pangrams of the English alphabet that are known use abbreviations or other non-dictionary words, such as "Blowzy night-frumps vex'd Jack Q." or "Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx." [3] or they include words so obscure that the phrase is challenging to understand, such as "Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz", [3] in which cwm is a loan word from the Welsh language meaning an amphitheatre-like glaciated depression, vext is an uncommon way to spell vexed, and quiz is used in an archaic sense to mean a puzzling or eccentric person. It means that symbols in the bowl-like depression on the edge of a long steep sea inlet confused an eccentric person.
Other writing systems may present more options: The Iroha is a well-known perfect pangram of the Japanese syllabary, while the Hanacaraka is a perfect pangram for the Javanese script and is commonly used to order its letters in sequence.
Whereas the English language uses all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet in native and naturalized words, many other languages using the same alphabet do not. Pangram writers in these languages are forced to choose between only using those letters found in native words or incorporating exotic loanwords into their pangrams. Some words, such as the Gaelic-derived whisk(e)y, which has been borrowed by many languages and uses the letters k, w and y, are a frequent fixture of many foreign pangrams.
There are also languages that use other Latin characters that do not appear in the traditional 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. This differs further from English pangrams, with letters such as ç, ä, and š.
Non-Latin alphabetic or phonetic scripts such as Greek, Armenian, and others can also have pangrams. [11] In some writing systems, exactly what counts as a distinct symbol can be debated. For example, many languages have accents or other diacritics, but one might count "é" and "e" as the same for pangrams. A similar problem arises for older English orthography that includes the long s ("ſ").
("Mr.Sangkhaphant Hengpithakfang - an elderly man who earns a living by selling bottles - was arrested for prosecution by police because he stole Lady Chatchada Chansamat's watch.") contains all the letters in the Thai alphabet, both obsolete and non-obsolete.
Logographic scripts, or writing systems such as Chinese that do not use an alphabet but are composed principally of logograms, cannot produce pangrams in a literal sense (or at least, not pangrams of reasonable size). The total number of signs is large and imprecisely defined, so producing a text with every possible sign is practically impossible. However, various analogies to pangrams are feasible, including traditional pangrams in a romanization.
In Japanese, although typical orthography uses kanji (logograms), pangrams can be made using every kana, or syllabic character. The Iroha is a classic example of a perfect pangram in non-Latin script.
In Chinese, the Thousand Character Classic is a 1000-character poem in which each character is used exactly once; however, it does not include all Chinese characters. The single character 永 (permanence) incorporates all the basic strokes used to write Chinese characters, using each stroke exactly once, as described in the Eight Principles of Yong.
Among abugida scripts, an example of a perfect pangram is the Hanacaraka (hana caraka; data sawala; padha jayanya; maga bathanga) of the Javanese script, which is used to write the Javanese language in Indonesia.
A self-enumerating pangram is a pangrammatic autogram, or a sentence that inventories its own letters, each of which occurs at least once. The first example was produced by Rudy Kousbroek, a Dutch journalist and essayist, who publicly challenged Lee Sallows, a British recreational mathematician resident in the Netherlands, to produce an English translation of his Dutch pangram. In the sequel, Sallows built an electronic "pangram machine", that performed a systematic search among millions of candidate solutions. The machine was successful in identifying the following 'magic' translation: [12] [13] [14]
Chris Patuzzo was able to reduce the problem of finding a self-enumerating pangram to the boolean satisfiability problem. He did this by using a made-to-order hardware description language as a stepping stone and then applied the Tseytin transformation to the resulting chip. [15] [16]
The pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", and the search for a shorter pangram, are the cornerstone of the plot of the novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. [17] The search successfully comes to an end when the phrase "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs" is discovered (which has only 6 duplicated vowels).
The scientific paper Cneoridium dumosum (Nuttall) Hooker F. Collected March 26, 1960, at an Elevation of about 1450 Meters on Cerro Quemazón, 15 Miles South of Bahía de Los Angeles, Baja California, México, Apparently for a Southeastward Range Extension of Some 140 Miles has a pangrammatic title, seemingly by pure chance.
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ⟨ó⟩, grave ⟨ò⟩, and circumflex ⟨ô⟩, are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided. Extended Ancient Greek texts avoiding the letter sigma are the earliest examples of lipograms.
The acute accent, ◌́, is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed characters are available.
The Danish and Norwegian alphabet is the set of symbols, forming a variant of the Latin alphabet, used for writing the Danish and Norwegian languages. It has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1948 (Danish):
The Swedish alphabet is a basic element of the Latin writing system used for the Swedish language. The 29 letters of this alphabet are the modern 26-letter basic Latin alphabet plus ⟨å⟩, ⟨ä⟩, and ⟨ö⟩, in that order. It contains 20 consonants and 9 vowels. The Latin alphabet was brought to Sweden along with the Christianization of the population, although runes continued in use throughout the first centuries of Christianity, even for ecclesiastic purposes, despite their traditional relation to the Old Norse religion. The runes underwent partial "latinization" in the Middle Ages, when the Latin alphabet was completely accepted as the Swedish script system, but runes still occurred, especially in the countryside, until the 18th century, and were used decoratively until mid 19th century.
Finnish orthography is based on the Latin script, and uses an alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, officially comprising twenty-nine letters but also including two additional letters found in some loanwords. The Finnish orthography strives to represent all morphemes phonologically and, roughly speaking, the sound value of each letter tends to correspond with its value in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) – although some discrepancies do exist.
The Slovene alphabet is an extension of the Latin script used to write Slovene. The standard language uses a Latin alphabet which is a slight modification of the Croatian Gaj's Latin alphabet, consisting of 25 lower- and upper-case letters:
Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. Old English was first written down using the Latin alphabet during the 7th century. During the centuries that followed, various letters entered or fell out of use. By the 16th century, the present set of 26 letters had largely stabilised:
The Polish alphabet is the script of the Polish language, the basis for the Polish system of orthography. It is based on the Latin alphabet but includes certain letters (9) with diacritics: the acute accent – kreska: ⟨ć, ń, ó, ś, ź⟩; the overdot – kropka: ⟨ż⟩; the tail or ogonek – ⟨ą, ę⟩; and the stroke – ⟨ł⟩. ⟨q⟩, ⟨v⟩, and ⟨x⟩, which are used only in foreign words, are usually absent from the Polish alphabet. Additionally, before the standardization of Polish spelling, ⟨qu⟩ was sometimes used in place of ⟨kw⟩, and ⟨x⟩ in place of ⟨ks⟩.
Alphabetical order is a system whereby character strings are placed in order based on the position of the characters in the conventional ordering of an alphabet. It is one of the methods of collation. In mathematics, a lexicographical order is the generalization of the alphabetical order to other data types, such as sequences of numbers or other ordered mathematical objects.
An autogram is a sentence that describes itself in the sense of providing an inventory of its own characters. They were invented by Lee Sallows, who also coined the word autogram. An essential feature is the use of full cardinal number names such as "one", "two", etc., in recording character counts. Autograms are also called 'self-enumerating' or 'self-documenting' sentences. Often, letter counts only are recorded while punctuation signs are ignored, as in this example:
This sentence employs two a's, two c's, two d's, twenty-eight e's, five f's, three g's, eight h's, eleven i's, three l's, two m's, thirteen n's, nine o's, two p's, five r's, twenty-five s's, twenty-three t's, six v's, ten w's, two x's, five y's, and one z.
Polish orthography is the system of writing the Polish language. The language is written using the Polish alphabet, which derives from the Latin alphabet, but includes some additional letters with diacritics. The orthography is mostly phonetic, or rather phonemic—the written letters correspond in a consistent manner to the sounds, or rather the phonemes, of spoken Polish. For detailed information about the system of phonemes, see Polish phonology.
Czech orthography is a system of rules for proper formal writing (orthography) in Czech. The earliest form of separate Latin script specifically designed to suit Czech was devised by Czech theologian and church reformist Jan Hus, the namesake of the Hussite movement, in one of his seminal works, De orthographia bohemica.
A heterogram is a word, phrase, or sentence in which no letter of the alphabet occurs more than once. The terms isogram and nonpattern word have also been used to mean the same thing.
Depending on the way one counts, the West Frisian alphabet contains between 25 and 32 characters.
Norwegian orthography is the method of writing the Norwegian language, of which there are two written standards: Bokmål and Nynorsk. While Bokmål has for the most part derived its forms from the written Danish language and Danish-Norwegian speech, Nynorsk gets its word forms from Aasen's reconstructed "base dialect", which is intended to represent the distinctive dialectal forms. Both standards use a 29-letter variant of the Latin alphabet and the same orthographic principles.
The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and used widely in international communication. They are the same letters that comprise the current English alphabet. Since medieval times, they are also the same letters of the modern Latin alphabet. The order is also important for sorting words into alphabetical order.
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is an English-language pangram – a sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet. The phrase is commonly used for touch-typing practice, testing typewriters and computer keyboards, displaying examples of fonts, and other applications involving text where the use of all letters in the alphabet is desired.
Danish orthography is the system and norms used for writing the Danish language, including spelling and punctuation.
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