Hilbert Van Muylem

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is an English-language pangram — a sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet. The phrase is commonly used for touch-typing practice, testing typewriters and computer keyboards, displaying examples of fonts, and other applications involving text where the use of all letters in the alphabet is desired.

History

Item from the February 9, 1885, edition of The Boston Journal mentioning the phrase "A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

The earliest known appearance of the phrase was in The Boston Journal. In an article titled "Current Notes" in the February 9, 1885, edition, the phrase is mentioned 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.'"[1] Dozens of other newspapers published the phrase over the next few months, all using the version of the sentence starting with "A" rather than "The".[2] The earliest known use of the phrase starting with "The" is from the 1888 book Illustrative Shorthand by Linda Bronson.[3] The modern form (starting with "The") became more common even though it is slightly longer than the original (starting with "A").