"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is an English-language pangram (a phrase that contains all of the letters of the alphabet). It has been used to test typewriters and computer keyboards, and in other applications involving all of the letters in the English alphabet. Due to its shortness and coherence, it has become widely known and is often used in visual arts.
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History
As the use of typewriters grew in the late 19th century, the phrase began appearing in typing and stenography lesson books as a practice sentence. Early examples of publications which utilized the phrase include Illustrative Shorthand by Linda Bronson (1888),[1] How to Become Expert in Typewriting: A Complete Instructor Designed Especially for the Remington Typewriter (1890),[2] and Typewriting Instructor and Stenographer's Hand-book (1892). By the turn of the 20th century, the phrase had become widely known. 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".[3] Robert Baden-Powell's book Scouting for Boys (1908) uses the phrase as a practice sentence for signalling.[4]
Variations
The standard version of the pangram has 35 letters, in which all 26 letters of the English alphabet occur at least once. The letters t, h, u, and r are used twice; e three times; and o four times.
A few variations of the pangram are sometimes encountered, including "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog", which is two letters shorter, and "The quick fox jumps over the lazy brown dog".
The sentence is often mistakenly rendered as "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," which does not include an s. However, this can be corrected by typing: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs".
Usage in typography
This pangram is commonly used to display font samples and for testing computer keyboards.
| Examples of how the phrase is used in font display | |
|---|---|
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| The phrase used to display fonts in Kfontview | The phrase used to compare common word-processor typefaces in OpenOffice |
Usage in popular culture
Due to the widespread knowledge of the phrase, and due to its comical nature, many artworks have been developed that pictorially depict the action of a fox jumping over a dog or a related variation of it. Dan Santat, creator of Disney Channel's The Replacements and children’s book author, has created a cartoon of the pangram on his blog in which he mistakenly substituted "jumped" for "jumps," thereby removing the letter "s" from his phrase. Furthermore, in his description of the illustration he wrote "aphabet" instead of "alphabet".[5] Other instances of phrase-related artworks include a typography workshop flyer[6], a widespread clipart image[7], and a music CD cover[8]. The May 9, 2008 issue of John Allen's the web-based comic Nest Heads features a child saying the phrase to a sleeping dog, in attempts to arouse him to play.[9] In the Disney movie The Fox and the Hound, there is a scene near the end where the fox is running fast and jumps over the lying-down hound, creating an in-context, non-contrived instance of the phrase. The phrase plays a key role in the plot of the 2001 Mark Dunn novel Ella Minnow Pea, which is set in a fictitious island nation supposed to be the home of the phrase's originator.
Close variations are often created when the phrase is used in the arts. In the card game Magic: The Gathering, a "joke card" from the Unhinged series was created with a game-related variation of the phrase, "The quick onyx goblin jumps over the lazy dwarf."[10] In the Peanuts comic strip for May 27, 1974, Snoopy, having been entrusted by Lucy to ghostwrite her a biography of Ludwig Van Beethoven, only writes on his typewriter “The quick brown fox jumps over the unfortunate dog”[11] because that phrase was all he ever learned to type.
The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould used it as the final line in his celebrated essay "The Panda's Thumb of Technology."[12]
The Electric Company used the phrase in a cartoon in which it appears in typewritten font and is read by a female voice. Then a small brown fox jumps over the sleeping dog repeatedly until the dog starts getting annoyed, then, the last time when the fox jumps over the dog, the dog stops him with one ear and as the fox walks away, the dog laughs himself silly.
In the 1981 movie Stripes starring Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and John Candy, the misfit platoon on the verge of being forced to repeat basic training wows the General at their graduation ceremony with an impromptu "drill". One of the phrases they use during the drill routine is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog...sir!"
The phrase, using "jumped" instead of "jumps" and hence missing the s, was used in a commercial for ESPN's SportsCenter in 2009. Jay Harris types the phrase while using the batting weights of Texas Rangers' slugger Josh Hamilton. The weights aid him to type the phrase faster with practice.
See also
References
- ^ Bronson, Linda Pennington (1888). Illustrative Shorthand. San Francisco. http://www.archive.org/details/illustrativeshor00salmrich.
- ^ Barnes, Lovisa Ellen (1890). How to Become Expert in Typewriting. http://www.archive.org/details/howtobecomeexpe00barngoog.
- ^ "The Fox Typewriter". Pitman's Phonetic Journal. January 10, 1903.
- ^ Baden-Powell, Robert (1908). Scouting for Boys. London: Pearson.
- ^ Illustration Friday - Alphabet, Doodlevision, Blogspot
- ^ Quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, The Art Direction and Copywriting Blog, Blogspot
- ^ Image, Westbroek.com
- ^ Cover, Blackberry-music.net
- ^ Nest Heads, John Allen, Go Comics
- ^ Now I Know My ABC's, Gatherer
- ^ alt.comics.peanuts, Google Groups
- ^ Gould, Stephen Jay (1987). "The Panda's Thumb of Technology." Natural History 96 (1): 14-23; Reprinted in Bully for Brontosaurus. New York: W.W. Norton. 1992, pp. 59-75.
External links
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