Pangram Checker

A pangram is a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet at least once. The best known is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, used for more than a century to test typewriters, keyboards and fonts. Writing your own is a satisfying puzzle. This tool checks a sentence instantly and shows exactly which letters are still missing.

Reading the result

As you type, the panel lists every letter of the alphabet with how often it appears. Missing letters are marked in red, and the message above tells you how many are left. The counters show the number of letters used, the total number of letters and how many extra letters the sentence has beyond one of each, a measure of how efficient your pangram is.

Perfect pangrams

A perfect pangram uses every letter exactly once, 26 letters in total for English. They are extremely hard to write naturally; known examples rely on rare words, names and abbreviations, such as “Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx”. The checker tells you when you have one.

Other alphabets

Pangrams exist in every alphabetic language. Choose the alphabet that matches your sentence. For English, French and Dutch, the 26 basic letters count and accents are ignored, so é counts as e. For German, Spanish, Swedish, Polish and Russian, the special letters of the alphabet — ä, ö, ü and ß; ñ; å, ä and ö; the Polish ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź and ż; the 33 Cyrillic letters of Russian — must each appear for the sentence to count as a pangram.

Tips for finishing a pangram

Rare letters are the hard part: j, q, x and z in English. Build the sentence around words that contain several of them at once, such as quiz, jinx, quartz, zephyr or jukebox, and fill in the common letters later. Watch the extra-letter count drop as you swap words.

Where pangrams are used

Font designers and graphic designers show every glyph of a typeface with a pangram. Typing tutors use them to practise all the keys. Developers use them to test that a display or a printer shows every character, and teachers use them as a playful vocabulary challenge.

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A worked example

Type “Pack my box with five liquor jugs” and the checker reports three letters missing: d, n and z. The panel shows them in red with a count of 0, while letters such as i and o appear more than once. Add “dozen” — “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs” — and the notice changes to a pangram of 32 letters, with six extra letters beyond one of each. Shortening it further would mean replacing words that repeat letters, which is how pangram writers work.

Checking a pangram in another language

Choose the alphabet before typing. A French pangram such as “Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume” passes the 26-letter check, because accents are ignored for French. A German sentence without ä, ö, ü or ß passes the English check but not the German one, which lists the missing special letters. Russian pangrams must contain all 33 Cyrillic letters, including ё, ъ and ь.

Related tools

Check letters you must avoid with the Lipogram Checker, compare letter sets with the Anagram Checker, practise with your pangram in the Typing Test, or count letters with the Word Counter.