“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a pangram (a phrase that contains all of the letters of the alphabet). It has been used to test typewriters andcomputer keyboards, and in other applications involving all of the letters in the English alphabet, because it is also a short coherent sentence.

It was known in the late 19th century, and Baden-Powell’s book Scouting for Boys(1908) uses the phrase as a practice sentence for signalling.^[1] It appears as a sample typing practice in L. Bronson’s, Illustrative Shorthand, 1888. ^[2] In the January 10, 1903 issue of Pitman’s Phonetic Journal, it is referred to as “the well known memorized typing line embracing all the letters of the alphabet”.

Variations

A few variations of this pangram exist, including “the quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog“, and “a quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog“. Each of these variations has 33 letters, compared to 35 in the title version.

The version “a quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog“, and any version with the wordjumped in the past tense eliminate one or more letters and hence, are not pangrams. A valid pangram variation is “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back“.