Testing with Pangrams

Or, what's in a name?

Welcome to Off the Clock — where we step away from the urgent and indulge the enduring.

Every other Saturday, I send a private note to subscribers exploring the curious corners of language, history, and the words we think we know—but don’t.

Foxhunting at Melton Mowbray, 1835: The Cream of the Thing by Edward Hull, ca. 1835, (public domain - Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

Hi, name is Scott and I love typewriters.

I have a small typewriter collection in my office.¹ If you happen to run into my wife, she’ll tell you that I have a typewriter problem. If I had a problem, I’d be a typewriter accumulator, not a collector.

Anyway, for those who grew up learning to type on a typewriter or for those who have an affliction like me, there is a standard sentence that is commonly used to test out the working conditions of the keys:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

That sentence does the heavy lifting of using every letter in the alphabet, thus testing the functionality of the main keys as well as the dexterity of the typist.

It’s a handy device called a pangram — a sentence that uses every letter in the alphabet at least once. The recent appearance of Pangram as the Substack-approved system for identifying AI writing has reminded me of the origins of the word the company is named for.

The earliest known appearance of the phrase was in The Boston Journal, on February 9, 1885, in an article titled “Current Notes”. The phrase was offered up as a good practice sentence for writing students:

“A favorite copy set by writing teachers for their pupils is the following, because it contains every letter of the alphabet: ‘A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’”

Pictorial depiction of the pangram from Scouting for Boys (1908)

Admittedly, it’s not the only pangrammatical sentence out there, but it is certainly easy to remember and a common one to use.

I can already sense what you’re thinking: “Are there other pangrams?” Of course there are. And we wouldn’t be Off the Clock if I didn’t share them with you:

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Can you think of others? Drop them in a comment below.

Meanwhile, let this stand as a reminder that all that slops glitters is not AI.

The company that is determined to identify non-human text (even though every AI platform is trained on human-created content) is itself lifting its name from a creative quirk of the English language that was identified some 140 years ago.

There’s so much to learn,

1. For the curious, this is what my collection currently consists of. These are all portables, which means I can keep them neatly stowed in their carrying cases.

Electrics:
1966 Royal Ultronic (in a beautiful oyster white)
1970 Smith Corona Electra 220 Automatic

1937 Royal Standard Portable Model O
1947 Royal Quiet De Luxe
1950 Smith Corona Skyriter (this one is quite slim and ultraportable — created so you could use it on the plane)
1954 Royal Quiet De Luxe
1958 Remington Quiet-Riter Eleven with Miracle Tab

1940 Remington Model 5 (unfortunately, this one is in disrepair and I’m not sure