I’ve been trying for years to come up with a pangram –a sentence with all the letters of the alphabet –that beats out the most famous one, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” (35 letters) or actually, its more svelte variant “Quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” (32).

Of course, I didn’t think to check Wikipedia until after I had come up with my own 29 letter pangram (above). With only three repeated letters, mine is pretty good, but there’s an even shorter one out there “Glib jocks quiz nymph to vex dwarf” (28)!

Interestingly I independently settled on three of the words found in the even shorter one, “jock(s)”, “quiz” and “vex.” It makes sense, those words all take care of more than one hard to place letter at once, and two of them are verbs. It’s hard, however, to beat the letter-gobbling power of nymph, a commonly used English word with five letters, and no “true” vowels.”