Legal Writing

Pangrams and Lipograms

By Maeve

I’ve long known that the sentence

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

contains every letter of the alphabet. What I didn’t know is that such a sentence has a special name. It’s a pangram.

pangram - from the Greek pan “every,” and gramma “letter” - also called a holoalphabetic sentence; “a sentence or (occas.) verse, containing every letter of the alphabet” (OED).

A “perfect” pangram would contain each letter only once and wouldn’t make much sense. For example: Jink cwm, zag veldt, fob qursh pyx

A lipogram is a sentence that is missing one or more letters.

lipogram - from a Greek word meaning “to be lacking” (no relation to liposuction in which the lipo is from a word for “fat”) The OED definition is “a composition from which the writer rejects all words that contain a certain letter or letters.”

One Christmas I received a card from a friend with a droll sense of humor. It took me awhile to figure it out. Although it is not a sentence, I think that it can count as a lipogram. Here’s the message that was inside the card:

a b c d e f g h i j k m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Hint: What’s another word for “Christmas”?

See the fascinating Wikipedia List of pangrams

Pangrams and Lipograms

Full post as published by Daily Writing Tips on March 10, 2009 (boomark / email).