The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

It has taught handwriting, tested typewriters and teleprinters and shown off fonts since the 1880s. It is less useful for building speed.

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The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Thirty-five letters, every letter of the alphabet at least once, and a sentence that very nearly means something. That combination has kept it in use for well over a century: copied out by handwriting pupils in the 1880s, typed on typewriters and teleprinters through the twentieth century, and still shown off in font previews today.

A sentence that uses every letter is called a pangram, from the Greek for "every letter". Here is where the fox came from, better pangrams if you are tired of it, pangrams in other languages, and what they are good for when you practise typing (and what they are not).

What does it mean?

Nothing in particular. There is no fable behind it and no hidden message. It is a sentence built to contain all 26 letters while still reading like ordinary English, and it does that job well. The words are common, the grammar is normal and the picture it paints (a fox, a dog, a jump) is easy to remember, which is why it beat the many stranger sentences that do the same thing.

It is not perfectly efficient. Of its 35 letters, O appears four times, E three times, and T, H, U and R twice each; the other 20 letters appear once. A "perfect" pangram uses each letter exactly once, in just 26 letters, and as the table below shows, perfection comes at the cost of sense.

One common slip: people often remember it as "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog". That version has no S in it, so it is no longer a pangram.

Where it came from

The earliest known appearance is in The Boston Journal in February 1885, in a slightly shorter form: "A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". The paper described it as a favourite copy that writing teachers set their pupils, chosen because it contained every letter of the alphabet, and dozens of other papers reprinted it over the following months. The version beginning with "The" first turns up, as far as anyone has found, in Linda Bronson's 1888 book Illustrative Shorthand.

Typewriters made it famous. Pangrams were a standard part of typewriting instruction, and a single sentence that touches every letter key is also the quickest way to check that every key on a machine prints properly. Typewriter and teleprinter technicians used the fox for exactly that.

Its most famous outing came on 30 August 1963, the day the Washington to Moscow hotline went live. Despite its popular image, the hotline was never a red telephone. It was a teleprinter link, and the first test message sent from Washington read THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG'S BACK 1234567890. "Jumped" loses the S, but "dog's back" puts it back, and the digits tested the number keys as well.

Today you are most likely to meet the fox, or a cousin of it, in a font preview, because a pangram shows every letter of a typeface at once. The text library used by the GNOME desktop on Linux, for example, keeps a sample sentence for each language to display in font menus. Its English one is "The wizard quickly jinxed the gnomes before they vaporized": a pangram with an in-joke.

Pangrams to use instead

If you have typed the fox a thousand times, these do the same job. Every one was checked to contain all 26 letters, and the counts include repeats.

Below about 29 letters, the sentences get strange quickly. "Cwm" is a Welsh word for a bowl-shaped valley and "vext" an old spelling of vexed, which tells you how hard the last few letters are to place. For typing practice, the ones in the middle of the table are the most useful: short enough to repeat, natural enough to read at speed.

Pangrams in other languages

Every alphabet has its own, and they are harder to write than English ones because there are more letters to fit in: ñ in Spanish, ç in Portuguese and French, ß and the umlauts in German, ğ, ı and ş in Turkish. Writers often lean on loanwords to get the letters their language rarely uses. Whisky turns up in a lot of them, for its K, W and Y, and kiwi appears in two of the five below.

These are the sample sentences that GNOME's text library uses for font previews in five of the languages on this site. Each was checked letter by letter against its own alphabet.

The Turkish one is a small marvel: 38 letters, a sensible sentence and every one of the 29 letters in the Turkish alphabet. The German one also covers all of its language's special letters. The French, Spanish and Portuguese ones cover the basic alphabet plus a few accents rather than all of them; French alone has more than a dozen accented letters, and fitting them all in takes a paragraph, not a sentence. The language names link to typing tests in each language, set to the matching keyboard layout.

What pangrams are good for

For typing, a pangram is a tool for a few specific jobs, and it does them well:

• Checking a keyboard. On a new keyboard or laptop, type the fox, then 1234567890, then the fox again in capitals. If every character appears, every key works. It is the same check the hotline engineers ran in 1963.
• Getting your bearings on a new layout. On a French AZERTY keyboard, A, Q, Z, W and M are all somewhere unexpected, and typing the French pangram finds every one of them in a single sentence.
• Warming up. Two or three slow, accurate runs wake up your little and ring fingers before a test, because Q, Z, X and P are exactly the keys those fingers otherwise get to ignore.
• Training accuracy. Type one pangram five times in a row with no mistakes, and start again after any error. It is a small target, and a clear one.

What pangrams are bad for

Building speed, and measuring it.

The letter mix is the problem. Count the letters in ten classic English novels from Project Gutenberg, about 5.2 million of them, and you can compare ordinary English with the fox directly:

Together, J, Q, X and Z make up less than half a percent of ordinary English letters but more than 11% of the fox, about 25 times their usual share. Z alone turns up around 46 times as often as it does in normal text. Meanwhile the letters you type all day are short-changed: E, T and A, the three most common letters in English, all appear less often than usual. Letter pairs tell the same story. Of the ten most common pairs in those novels (th, he, in, er, an, re, nd, ha, ou and ed), the fox contains only three. Practise the fox a lot and you get very good at typing the fox.

Measuring speed is the second problem. After a few repetitions you know the sentence by heart, and typing from memory is faster than typing what you read, so a fox time flatters you. That is why typing tests use fresh text. The tests on this site pick common words at random, so there is no sentence to memorise.

How long the fox takes

Typing speed counts five characters, spaces included, as one word. The fox is 43 characters with its spaces, which makes 8.6 standard words:

So if you can type it cleanly in under five seconds, you are typing it at more than 100 WPM. Remember the memory problem before you put that on your CV. For a figure that means something, take a one-minute typing test and compare the result with the average typing speed chart.

A five-minute pangram warm-up

Used sparingly, pangrams make a good start to a practice session. Try this before a test or a lesson:

1. Put your hands on the home row and type the fox three times, slowly, with no mistakes. If you make one, start that line again.
2. Type two other pangrams from the table, twice each, at the same careful pace.
3. Type one with capitals and punctuation, such as "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.", pressing Shift with the hand that is not typing the letter.
4. Stop there, and take a real test with ordinary words. That is where the warm-up pays off.

Then leave the pangrams alone until next time. For what to do with the rest of your practice, typing tips and tricks has plenty of ideas.

Sources

• “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, Wikipedia, citing The Boston Journal (February 1885) and Linda Bronson, Illustrative Shorthand (1888).
• Barbara Maranzani, “In Case of Emergency: The Washington-Moscow Hotline Turns 50”, History.com, 2013.
• “There Never Was Such a Thing as a Red Phone in the White House”, Smithsonian Magazine.
• The Kermit Project, “UTF-8 Sampler”, pangrams section (kermitproject.org).
• GNOME Pango, language sample table, pango-language-sample-table.h (sample text for font selection menus).
• Letter and letter-pair counts: ten public-domain novels from Project Gutenberg, about 5.2 million letters, counted for this guide.