What is the term for a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet?

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A sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet is called a pangram.

The term also applies more broadly to a phrase or word that uses every letter of a specified alphabet at least once. The best-known English example is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” which contains all 26 letters. Because it is short and uses familiar words, it became useful for testing typewriters, keyboards, telegraph equipment, and digital fonts.

Pangrams are not the same as anagrams, which rearrange the letters of a word or phrase, or palindromes, which read the same forward and backward. A lipogram deliberately avoids one or more letters, making it almost the opposite of a pangram.

A perfect pangram uses every letter exactly once. Such sentences are much harder to create, especially in English, because the uncommon letters q, x, z, and j must fit naturally into a meaningful sentence. Pangrams can also be designed for alphabets other than English.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Aug. 2026

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