The phrase The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog or A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog was frequently used to test typewriters, because it is a coherent short sentence that uses all the letters in the English language alphabet. Such a sentence is called a pangram. Another phrase that serves the same purpose is, "How razorback jumping frogs can level six piqued gymnasts!".
Only the letters "a", "e", "o", "r", and "u" are used more than once, each being used twice, except for "o" which is used four times.
In the age of computers, the sentence is often used as a sample text in font selection contexts. It is also used on occasion as an exemplary meta-sentence.
This sentence is frequently mis-quoted as "The quick brown fox jumped over a lazy dog", which does not contain all the letters of the alphabet as the letter "s" is missing.
In the novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, the inventor of the phrase lives on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina.
The phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" can be generated in the English Microsoft Word by typing =rand() and pressing the ENTER key. |