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Pangrams were pure wordplays, that because of IT has become a nice tool to test keyboard and fonts, assuming they are easy to remember and short. Therefore perfect pangrams are so nice: you don't need to repeat any character (with the exception of the space).

I've looked on the list of pangrams and I've noticed that most of them are either not perfect or are heavily using acronyms, initials, own names etc. (which I call not "honest", because it's a bit cheating).

Those "honest" looked like a gibberish for me:

Jink cwm, zag veldt, fob qursh pyx

However, those are real English words, only I doubt a bit, a regular native speaker would understand them. So 2 questions arise:

1) Are such pangrams as above understandable for a regular English native speaker?

2) If not, are there any others that would be perfect, honest (no acronyms, exotic own names etc.) and written with commonly known words?

Just to give some context, the Polish perfect pangram

Mężny bądź, chroń pułk twój i sześć flag.

would be understood by any native speaker, and it makes perfectly sense (be brave, protect your regiment and six flags). It's a poetry masterpiece, you can say.

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  • English doesn't have accented characters, so one might accuse the Polish one of "cheating". Allowing accented characters increases the possibilities greatly.
    – Andrew Leach ♦
    May 2, 2014 at 14:03
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    @AndrewLeach Polish doesn't have accented characters too. A perfect pangram is a pangram, which uses each character of the alphabet exactly once, and this is exactly the case there. In fact, I've always thought it increases the difficutly because there are more characters to use, and some are very rare. But in fact, it may be the case with any character in any alphabet, even the shorter one.
    – Danubian Sailor
    May 2, 2014 at 14:12
  • So Polish counts the characters ąężź as different from aez and presumably they have their own place in the alphabet. Didn't know that. (I did know that ł and l are different, though, although I would still call that an accented character.)
    – Andrew Leach ♦
    May 2, 2014 at 14:16
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    @frances yes, it could be exactly the case. The consonant clusters arey very typical for Polish, which makes using all consonants and not running out of vowels much easier. It seems, that the challenge isn't fair for all participants :)
    – Danubian Sailor
    May 2, 2014 at 14:23
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    This is probably the shortest one that would make sense to a casual reader: "Waltz job vexed quick frog nymphs." (28 letters)
    – Ronan
    May 2, 2014 at 14:26

6 Answers 6

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A Google search turned up a number of candidates.

With 28 letters, there are a few which can be made:

Waltz job vexed quick frog nymphs (courtesy of Ronan)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Brick quiz whangs jumpy veldt fox
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud

There's at least one 27-letter pangram, which makes sense but is probably better thought of as a headline:

Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymph

And if you allow standard abbreviations, you can do 26:

Mr Jock, TV Quiz PhD, bags few lynx

I vote Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow as the best (28 characters; repeats a and o).

Update: The perfect pangram Quartz glyph job vex'd cwm finks — another headline — appears in a number of internet pages, too, along with O.A. Booty's explanation, "Despicable vandals from the valley are thwarted by finding a block of quartz with carvings already on it." But I don't know if the Welsh word cwm is understandable to a regular native user.

As Frances has commented, English has only five vowels (and y). Any word with q automatically uses u and another vowel, unless Arabic words (suq) or Chinese words (Qi) are allowed. In the last example, using the Welsh word cwm introduces another vowel which makes more words possible.

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  • Cwm is perfectly understandable for me (though of course more likely to be spelt coomb(e)), but then I'm not sure if I'm really a ‘regular’ user…
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    May 2, 2014 at 15:18
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Yes, me neither. It's similar to the reason why (in my line of work) developers should never write user guides.
    – Andrew Leach ♦
    May 2, 2014 at 15:25
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    @JanusBahsJacquet: I would think cwm is a Welsh valley, co(o)mbe is a West Country valley and neither a Welshman nor a West Countryman would thank you for confusing the two.
    – Tim Lymington
    May 2, 2014 at 16:03
  • @Tim, I’m sure you’re right. According to the dictionary, a cwm isn’t even a valley, but a cirque—but since I have no idea what the difference is, and most likely wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other if I were standing in it, that doesn’t help me much. I would assume a cwm to be in Wales, but apart from the fact that there don’t seem to be (m)any co(o)mb(e)s outside the British Isles in general, I wouldn’t assume such a one to be in any particular geographic location.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    May 2, 2014 at 16:20
  • "Mr Jock, TV Quiz PhD, bags few lynx" is certainly vastly preferable to "Jink cwm, zag veldt, fob qursh pyx" - it makes sense as a sentence, and all the words would be recognizable to most people. Perhaps the latter makes sense as a sentence too, I can't say as I only recognise a few of the words.
    – Max Williams
    Jul 20, 2016 at 16:08
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Steve Galen, on his blog suggest the following perfect pangram:

GQ's oft-lucky whiz Dr. J, ex-NBA MVP

What makes it so interesting is that it describes a real situation.

  • Dr. J. is the nickname of professional basketball player Julius Erving, who is retired from the NBA (ex-NBA)
  • Erving has won the MVP award 4 times
  • He appeared on the cover of GQ magazine in February, 2011:

GQ cover

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My favorite Perfect Pangram (26 letter ) is "Fox TV Janglers whiz by muck PDQ". I can't remember where I heard it, though. As a lover of hairless cats, one of my favorite "nearly perfect" pamgrams is "Jackdaws love my big Sphynx of quartz".

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While it's not short, characterwise, this is the only five-word pangram I know of, making it snappy and easy to remember: “Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes”

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I didn't like the grammar presented in the most popular 26 character perfect pangram:

Mr Jock, TV Quiz PhD, bags few lynx
So I used the same style of using a name to give the sentence structure and found the following headline style phrase to be the most pleasing to me:

J. W. Covek finds quartz BMX glyph

...still a silly sentence though.

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The classic pangram is:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

(I'm honestly rather surprised that this hadn't been posted as an answer yet.)

It's easy to understand, easy to remember and it just has a ring to it.

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    No one has posted that pangram yet because it's not an answer to the OP's question, which is about perfect pangrams, i.e. pangrams that don't repeat any letters.
    – Ubik
    Sep 1, 2015 at 19:44

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