The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

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"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is a pangram (a phrase that uses all the letters of the alphabet) that has been used to test typewriters and computer keyboards because it is nicely coherent and short. It was known in the late 19th century, and Baden-Powell's book Scouting for Boys (1908) used the phrase as a practice sentence for signalling.[1] In later years, the phrase was popularized by Western Union and the Telephone Company to test Telex/TWX data communication equipment for accuracy and reliability. It was often used for testing the teletype services (a procedure known as "foxing") when these machines were still used, as indicated in many reports of shortwave radio listeners to communications magazines or to services such as QTH.net.[citation needed] Many minor variations exist, including replacing one of the "the"s with an "a". Although it is the most popular, many other sentences are shorter and use each letter of the alphabet, such as "The five boxing wizards jump quickly."[2]

Contents

[edit] Usages in computing

An example of the phrase being used to display fonts.
An example of the phrase being used to display fonts.

[edit] Commodore 64 Software

Quick Brown Fox was the name of a vendor and word processing software package that ran on the Vic 20 and Commodore 64.

[edit] Microsoft Word

In Microsoft Word 2003 or earlier, typing =rand(x,y), where x and y are integers, then pressing Enter at the end of the sentence causes the original sentence to be replaced by the phrase repeatedly for x paragraphs and y sentences per paragraph. In Microsoft Word 2007, it has been changed to =rand.old(x,y).

[edit] Font Display

The pangram is a frequently-used phrase used to display font samples, as it contains all letters of the alphabet in a meaningful phrase.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Baden-Powell, Robert (1908). Scouting for Boys. London: Pearson. 
  2. ^ List of English sentences that contain all letters of the alphabet

[edit] External links