A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least one time.

The longer version

A pangram packs the whole alphabet into one line, which makes it a handy test: a keyboard, a type specimen or a printer font reveals broken letters, missing glyphs and spacing faults at a glance. Ordinary sentences leave many letters unused, so a pangram is deliberately engineered rather than naturally occurring.

Typing teachers adopted such sentences as drills for exactly that reason, and font designers still set them as specimen lines. A stricter version, the perfect pangram, uses each letter exactly once, which is far harder to make readable. Other writing systems build their own versions, and in languages with more letters the exercise becomes a serious puzzle rather than a warm-up.

Where this entry sits

This category gathers small surprises about the English language, from odd spelling rules to words that quietly hide their own history. Expect palindromes, punctuation oddities, borrowed terms, and the strange ways writing systems record spoken speech. The full list sits on the Words and Language page, where every entry is listed in order.