Perhaps you recall the oft-used sentence: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet is used within it. It is not necessarily the most parsimonious such sentence however, since it uses 36 letters to do this. The site A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia discusses these "pangrams" with considerable thoroughness.

It is thus natural to wonder if there a sentence which uses exactly 26 letters, each different. Alternatively, since one person's poem is another's nonsense, let's forget about sentences -- two people are unlikely to share the same idea of what a sentence is. Let's just go for sets of words.

Going a step further, let's simply outlaw multiple occurrences of letters within the set and see how many distinct letters can be used within a set of words.

Below are several sets of words.

Before each set appears a number (in the range 0-26) representing the count of distinct letters appearing in the word list. The words in the list follow the constraint that no two words share any letters in common and no individual word uses any letter more than once. Letters that are not used in the set are shown in parentheses.

English: Note: several 26 letter solutions can be found at A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia Page 9 maintained by Jeff Miller who notes the following about a solution apparently contained in the Guiness Book of World Records:

In the 1980s Michael Jones submitted two pangrams to Guinness: "Veldt jynx grimps waqf zho buck" and "Qursh gowf veldt jynx zimb pack." Guinness chose the first one. Michael writes that the second pangram "describes a scene where some Arabian coins are striking a group of flies gathered on that woodpecker. (Qursh can be used as plural according to W3; all my words come from W3). I liked this second pangram more because I preferred using 'qursh' over 'waqf,' but Guinness chose the other one."

24 (vq) 6 words

lymph bugs jinx wrack fez dot

24 (vq) 6 words

lynx craft jump whiz desk bog

25 (q) 6 words

lynx vamp whiz frock debt jugs

24 (qv) 6 words

junk plight combs dry wax fez

23 (kqv) 6 words

myth flax zinc jug pods brew

23 (bvg) 5 words (using q)

quartz jinx lymph docks few

24 (qz) 6 words

frown lymph just vex dig back

19 (hklqvxyz) -- best with three words?

pacify judgments brow

17 (fgjkpqvwz) -- best with two words?

ambidextrous lynch

15 (dfjkmqsvwxz)-- best with one word? See for more details.

uncopyrightable

French 21 (bhjkw)

coq (cock) temps (time) lynx (lynx) vif (alive) dur (hard) gaz (gas)

26/33 (fx(ts)(shch)(ye)(yu)) Russian

1 - soft sign

2 - hard sign

The reader is invited to

• get better than 23 while using "q" and limiting oneself to relatively common words.
• do better than 19 with only three words
• do better than 17 with only two words
• do better than 14 with only one word
• suggest a nice cluster of four words
• do better than 21 in French or 26 in Russian (or overcome the difficulty with knig, which is more a word-stem than a word).
• contribute lists in other languages

 Let me know David.Dailey@sru.edu