The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Pangrams
Letters, letters, letters

There’s something special about the following sentence:

The five boxing wizards jump quickly.

Can you figure out what it is? Remember, it’s all about letters . . .

Give up?

The answer is that it contains every letter of the alphabet—from A to Z. Have another look and check for yourself. Every single letter.

These kinds of sentences are called pangrams, which comes from two ancient Greek words—pan, meaning “all,” and gramma,which you might remember means “letter.” People have been writing pangrams for centuries, and not only with the English alphabet. There are pangrams in the Hebrew Bible, as well as in ancient Greek literature, such as Homer’s Odyssey. And there’s a pangram in Japanese that’s more than a thousand years old—a poem called the Iroha.

Pangrams became most common after typewriters were invented in the late nineteenth century. This is because a pangram is a very quick way to make sure that all the keys on a keyboard are working. The most famous of all pangrams—The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog—was developed for this specific reason.

Pangrams are also a handy way of comparing all the letters in different fonts. Hmm, which do you prefer?

or

People are inventing new pangrams every day, just for the challenge. What’s called a “perfect” pangram is one that contains only 26 letters in total, but they’re very difficult to make up. Most pangrams contain many more letters than that.

A game you can play (and it’s easier than inventing a pangram itself) is to write a story where each word begins with a different letter of the alphabet in order. To give you an idea, on the next page is one that the Word Snoop just made up.

A black cat dreamt every fourth goose hunted invisible jellyfish. Kindly let many nice ostriches pass quickly. Rather stupidly the umbrella voted when x-raying yellow zebras.

Why not try to make up your own crazy pangrammatic story?