A French writer named Georges Perec once wrote an entire 300-page novel without using the letter E. Not once “E”—”La disparition”. Which tells you something about the French relationship with the alphabet — and why their pangrams are stranger than English ones.
What is a pangram?
A pangram is a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet at least once. The word comes from the Greek pan (all) and gram (something written). You may also see them called holoalphabetic sentences, which is a much less useful term than pangram.
The most famous one in English — “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” — has been around since at least 1885. It uses 35 letters, no proper nouns, no abbreviations, and it makes sense. That last part is harder than it sounds.
What are pangrams used for?
Graphic designers use them to preview fonts — every letter visible in one sentence before committing to a typeface. They also turn up in calligraphy practice and spelling bee puzzles. Mostly, they are a constraint problem: how do you use every letter of the alphabet in the fewest characters without producing gibberish?
The perfect pangram
It’s almost impossible to make the perfect pangram. The rules are:
- All 26 letters, each used exactly once
- No single letters, acronyms, abbreviations, numbers, or proper nouns.
- The sentence has to be easily understood, not gibberish like “Mr. Jock, TV quiz Ph.D., bags few lynx.”
That’s why most pangrams have more than 26 characters, and the best pangrams are the shortest ones that are the most easily understandable.
French pangrams have a complication
The French language has something the English language doesn’t: accented letters and ligatures. If you include all of them, a complete French pangram needs a minimum of 42 characters:
- 26 standard alphabet letters
- +14 accented letters: à â ä é è ê ë ï î ô ö ù û ç
- +2 ligatures: æ and œ
The æ ligature and the tremas Ü and Ÿ are usually left out — they appear mainly in borrowed words, not native French ones. Most French pangrams are built on the standard 26.
The most well-known French pangrams
1. Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume (37 letters)
Take this old whisky to the blond smoking judge.
The most recognised pangram among French speakers. Some think Perec invented it, which would be fitting. A man who removed one letter from an entire novel, building a sentence that requires all of them.
2. Voix ambiguë d’un cœur qui au zéphyr préfère les jattes de kiwis (53 letters with accents)
Ambiguous voice of a heart which prefers bowls of kiwis to the west wind.
This one is used by graphic designers and font developers to display every accented letter on a single line. The œ ligature in the word cœur is the reason it exists.
Other French pangrams
3. Voyez le brick géant que j’examine près du wharf (39 letters)
Look at the giant brig I’m examining near the wharf.
4. Buvez de ce whisky que le patron juge fameux (36 letters)
Drink some of this whisky the boss finds excellent.
Whisky appears twice in the top four. The letter W doesn’t occur naturally in French words — borrowed terms are doing the heavy lifting throughout.
5. Joyeux, ivre, fatigué, le nez qui pique, Clown Hary skie dans l’ombre (53 letters)
Happy, drunk, tired, itchy nose — Clown Hary skis in the shadows.
6. Bâchez la queue du wagon-taxi avec les pyjamas du fakir (46 letters)
Cover the tail of the taxi railcar with the fakir’s pyjamas.
7. Hier, au zoo, j’ai vu dix guépards, cinq zébus, un yak et le wapiti fumer (55 letters)
Yesterday at the zoo I saw ten cheetahs, five zebus, a yak and the elk smoking.
The elk smoking. Nobody explains it. That is correct.
8. Monsieur Jack, vous dactylographiez bien mieux que votre ami Wolf (55 letters)
Mister Jack, you type much better than your friend Wolf.
The one with everything
9. Dès Noël où un zéphyr haï me vêt de glaçons würmiens je dîne d’exquis rôtis de bœuf au kir à l’aÿ d’âge mûr & cætera (116 letters)
From Christmas, when a hated zephyr covers me in Würmian icicles, I dine on exquisite roast beef with a mature kir from Aÿ, and so on.
A few things to know: kir is a French aperitif, Aÿ is a wine-producing region in Champagne, and würmiens refers to some ice formations from the Pleistocene Alps. As far as I can tell.
As far as I know, this is the only French pangram that contains all 26 letters, all 14 accented variants, and both ligatures. It is extremely difficult to type quickly. Nobody has improved on it.
One last thing
Japanese and Chinese have tens of thousands of characters. The Khmer alphabet has 74 letters, written left to right with no spaces. My mother’s first language is Thai — 72 characters, 44 consonants, 28 vowels. Pangrams exist in all of them, but the rules have to bend considerably. Some constraints only exist because of the alphabet you were handed.
