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Do you know pangrams shorter than the traditional ‘the quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog’ ?

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The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog – Henry Mar 17 '11 at 15:04
The quick lazy dog jumps over a brown fox. – Pratik Deoghare Mar 18 '11 at 20:30
General Reference: Wikipedia has a list of perfect pangrams and more. (via @hellion) – coleopterist Feb 28 at 4:17

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6 Answers

up vote 13 down vote

How quickly daft jumping zebras vex.

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How vexingly quick daft zebras jump. – Peter Shor Mar 17 '11 at 17:12
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Jocks find quartz glyph, vex BMW.

(26 characters)

See more here on the Wikipedia page on pangrams.

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Does that really make sense? – Benoit Mar 17 '11 at 12:49
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Using abbreviation of german words has to violate the spirit of the question. – Eric Wilson Mar 17 '11 at 13:57
Uh, unless I'm counting wrong, that's exactly 26 letters, i.e. the shortest possible pangram. Or does the 32 count spaces and commas as well? – Marthaª Mar 17 '11 at 14:46
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@FarmBoy: I think you can easily make the argument that BMW is as much an English word as any other car company's name. – Kosmonaut Mar 17 '11 at 14:56
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@FarmBoy: The word games that disallow proper nouns, like Scrabble and Boggle, have specific rules that state this. Other word games, like crossword puzzles or Mad Libs, have no such restrictions. A pangram isn't even a game, it's simply a sentence containing every letter at least once. – Kosmonaut Mar 18 '11 at 0:44
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up vote 4 down vote

Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz

is my personal favorite, although sadly weighing in at one character more than MachineCharmer's.

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Funny that the word quartz appears in many of these pangrams.It contains letters q and z, which are not frequent compared to most of the other letters. – b.roth Mar 17 '11 at 13:05
up vote 2 down vote

If I recall correctly, the shortest was a newspaper headline about some vandals who wanted to carve something into a quartz column, only to find it had already been vandalized: "Quartz glyph job vex'd cwm finks" - 26 letters, + apostrophe.

I'm not sure how the cwm (coom) works into it, unless there was a valley involved.

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They need glasses: o͞o – mplungjan Mar 17 '11 at 14:03
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Vandals from a Welsh valley. – e100 Mar 17 '11 at 14:07
up vote 2 down vote

The five boxing wizards jump quickly.

(Also 31 characters.)

I used this panagram in an introduction to computer science class to test the students' understanding of arrays.

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up vote 2 down vote

Cheating...

I tried to use the Internet Anagram Server to find pangrams with only 26 letters, but it says the server load is too high right now, but it did offer a link to another page with only pangrams. Here is the list they provide (some already offered in other answers):

  • Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. (thirty-two letters)
  • Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz. (thirty-one)
  • How quickly daft jumping zebras vex. (thirty)
  • Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim. (twenty-nine)
  • Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud. (twenty-eight)
  • Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymph. (twenty-seven)
  • Mr. Jock, TV quiz Ph.D., bags few lynx. (twenty-six!)
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