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February 06, 2008
Pangrams
A pangram is a sentence that includes each of the 26 letters in the alphabet.
The most familiar one is the old chestnut: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
I was sitting on the train to Philly with about an hour to kill.
I completed the crossword and sudoku in the local paper but still had about 20 minutes, so I created a game for myself: what is the shortest pangram I can write that doesn't use any of the words of the example just given? (with the exception of the word, 'the')
I started flexing my brain by trying to shorten the original sentence. The original has 35 letters, but it can be adjusted to: "The quick brown fox jumps over lazy dogs" at 33 characters.
So my target is less than 33 characters, although that seems ambitious with only 7 letter repetitions.
After some time I came up with: "A jovial bird maps the fog, quacking in the waxy haze." (42 characters)
It could be a little shorter, but the sentence would lose some of its coherence and rhythm.
I encourage everyone to try and come up with their own.
AskOxford.com is a fun site to surf around on if you enjoy fooling around with words.
Posted by mslaybau at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)