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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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  • 4
    The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog
    – Henry
    Mar 17, 2011 at 15:04
  • The quick lazy dog jumps over a brown fox.
    – Pratik Deoghare
    Mar 18, 2011 at 20:30
  • General Reference: Wikipedia has a list of perfect pangrams and more. (via @hellion)
    – coleopterist
    Feb 28, 2013 at 4:17
  • The following 14 letter words might help. They each don't use the same letter more than once: ambidextrously benzhydroxamic dermatoglyphic hydromagnetics hydropneumatic pseudomythical Schizotrypanum subformatively sulphogermanic undiscoverably. And this one has 15 letters ... dermatoglyphics.
    – alan2here
    Jan 12, 2018 at 18:08

6 Answers 6

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How quickly daft jumping zebras vex.

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  • 11
    How vexingly quick daft zebras jump.
    – Peter Shor
    Mar 17, 2011 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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  • 6
    Does that really make sense?
    – Benoit
    Mar 17, 2011 at 12:49
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    Using abbreviation of german words has to violate the spirit of the question.
    – Eric Wilson
    Mar 17, 2011 at 13:57
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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, 2011 at 14:56
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    @Kosmonaut It's typically the case that proper nouns and abbreviations are not allowed in word games like scrabble. Arbitrary? Sure. But expected by many.
    – Eric Wilson
    Mar 17, 2011 at 20:55
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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, 2011 at 0:44
5

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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3

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, 2011 at 13:05
3

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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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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2
  • They need glasses: o͞o
    – mplungjan
    Mar 17, 2011 at 14:03
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    Vandals from a Welsh valley.
    – e100
    Mar 17, 2011 at 14:07

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