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Some Well-Known Pangrams

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

This is undoubtedly the best known pangram. It contains all 26 letters of the alphabet (as it must do in order to be a pangram) and is 35 letters long. That means that is not particularly economical with 9 surplus letters.

A keen eye will spot that the word the occurs twice, and so one of them can be considered to be composed entirely of surplus letters. Removal of either the renders the sentence less grammatically correct which is undesirable. However, either of them may be exchanged for the much shorter indefinite article, a, thus saving on 2 letters:

The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.

This is 33 letters in length. That can be beaten with the following, which has just 32 letters:

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

Perfect Pangrams (exactly 26 letters) have been composed, but none makes good sense, being rather more a string of obscure words than a sentence.

Listed below you will find a number of English pangrams arranged in descending order of length (the number of letters used is shown in red). No pangrams over twice the length of the alphabet (i.e. 52 letters) have been included.

In the remaining pangrams, each letter of the alphabet occurs once and only once. These pangrams are also anagrams of the alphabet. They are called perfect pangrams.

Note: Since we added this pangram section, our visitors have sent in hundreds of their personal favourite pangrams. We've created a page showcasing all of the best ones. Be sure to check out our pangrams submissions page.

See also the history of pangrams and find out about lorem ipsum. And if you like travel games and word games, then you'll love the Pangrammatic Highway.

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