Any good examples of a pangram

asks Modge:

A. A pangram is a sentence or phrase which contains every letter of the alphabet. It comes from the Greek for 'all' and 'letters'.

Q. Surely that's not too difficult to do
A. Not if it's a long sentence, but it's much trickier to make a really short one which also makes sense.

Q. Where did they originate
A. They used to have a practical function. Typographers, who prepare text for printing, needed to see samples of various styles of text. A pangram was the most practical way of displaying each character of a typeface. (Pangrams are also useful for practising typing on a keyboard and learning where each letter is.)

Q. Do typographers use pangrams today
A. Yes. In fact, the oldest pangram, which was set as a typeface sample 500 years ago, is still used today - in one version or another.

Q. What is it
A. It's nonsensical Latin, and contains all 23 letters of the Latin alphabet:
'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,
diam nonnumy eiusmod tempor incidunt ut labore et dolo...'

Q. Where does it come from
A. It is supposed to be composed from sections from Cicero's de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (45BC):
'Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum
quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...'
('There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it, and wants to have it, simply because it is pain...')

Q. What is the best-known pangram
A. Without a doubt, it is 'The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog'. With 35 letters, it contains only 9 extra letters.

Q. Is this the shortest one that can be done
A. No, there are few well-known shorter pangrams. Some examples from the fun-with-words website are:

• 'Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex bud' (28 letters)
• 'Quick zephyrs blow, vexing daft Jim' (29)
• 'How quickly daft jumping zebras vex' (30)
• 'Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz' (31)
• 'Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs' (32)
• 'Jump by vow of quick, lazy strength in Oxford' (36)

Q. Has there ever been a pangram of just 26 letters
A. Yes, there have been a few, but none which makes a real sentence, for example, 'Blowzy night-frumps vex'd Jack Q'.

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By Sheena Miller