A sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet is called a pangram. The word comes from Greek roots meaning “every letter,” and the definition can apply to a sentence, phrase, or even a single word that uses each letter of a specified alphabet at least once.
The best-known English example is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” It became popular in the late 19th century and was later used by Western Union to test telegraph and telex equipment. Today, pangrams remain useful for testing keyboards, fonts, typefaces, handwriting, and character encoding.
A pangram does not need to use each letter only once. A “perfect pangram” does: every alphabet letter appears exactly one time. That is why “pangram” is not the same as “anagram,” which rearranges letters, or “palindrome,” which reads the same forward and backward. A “lipogram,” by contrast, deliberately avoids one or more letters.