Those funny Pangrams that have every letter of the alphabet aren’t restricted to English. Here are some French Pangrams and their translations. Not sure what a pangram is? I got you covered there, too.
What is a pangram?
A pangram is a sentence that has all the letters of the alphabet.
The word pangram comes from the Greek root “Pan,” which means “all,” and “gram,” which is attached to root words to form nouns that refer to “something written,” “drawn,” or “recorded,” such as telegram, pictogram, anagram, and Instagram.
Pangrams are also referred to as holoalphabetic sentences or alphabet sentences
What are pangrams used for?
People once used pangrams to practice penmanship and handwriting. As the use of typewriters grew, they were used for typewriting drills and exercises. Today, pangrams have many more uses:
- Graphic designers use them to see what each letter looks like before using a new font.
- Practicing calligraphy.
- Pangram puzzles are often part of a spelling bee where contestants are given letters and try to form words out of them.
How to make the perfect pangram
It’s almost impossible to make the perfect pangram.
It would require the following:
- A sentence using all of the letters of the alphabet ONLY once.
- None of the letters can be solitary letters, acronyms, abbreviations, numbers, or proper nouns.
- And 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.
The quick brown fox
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is the most well-known pangram in English that’s been around since 1885, maybe longer. It uses exactly 35 letters of the alphabet, has no single letters, acronyms, numbers or proper pronouns, but most importantly, it’s easy to understand.
In languages that don’t use Roman letters, such as Chinese, Korean and Thai, things get a little more complicated.
Take Japanese and Chinese, which have tens of thousands of characters. The Thai language has 72 characters, 44 consonants and 28 vowels. The Khmer alphabet has 74 letters, is written from left to right and contains no spaces. Pangrams do exist in these languages, but they have a different set of rules for creating them.
Examples of French Pangrams
French pangrams (une pangramme) are similar to English ones and should contain all 26 letters of the alphabet, and most French pangrams are constructed this way.
However, the French language has something the English language doesn’t: accented letters and ligatures.
If you include all the accented letters and ligatures in a French pangram, then that number increases to a minimum of 42 letters.
- 26 letters of the alphabet:
- 16 Accented letters: (à – â – ä – é – è – ê – ë – ï – î – ô – ö – ù – û – ç)
- 2 Ligatures: ( æ et œ).
The (æ) ligature and Ü and Ÿ trema’s are usually not included in a French pangram because they are mainly used for borrowed loan words, not French words.
The most well-known French pangrams
The two most well-known Pangrams in the French language have to do with whisky, Kiwis and zephyrs.
1) Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume (37 letters no accents)
Take this old whisky to the blond smoking judge.
This isn’t the oldest or shortest pangram in French, but it’s the most well-known one among French speakers.
Some think it was invented by Georges Perec, an unusual French writer who wrote a novel without the letter “E”—”La disparition.”
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 kiwi bowls to a zephyr
This French pangram is often used to test typography fonts and demonstrate what all the letters look like before downloading them to use in graphic designs or word processing software on computers.
Other French Pangrams
Here are some other French Pangrams that are not quite as well known as the first two on this list but are famous enough.
3) Voyez le brick géant que j’examine près du wharf (39 letters)
Look at the giant brig I’m examining next to the wharf
4) Buvez de ce whisky que le patron juge fameux. (36)
Drink some of this whisky which the boss finds excellent.
5) Joyeux, ivre, fatigué, le nez qui pique, Clown Hary skie dans l’ombre. (53 lettres)
Happy, drunk, tired, itchy, Clown Hary is skiing in the shadows.
6) Bâchez la queue du wagon-taxi avec les pyjamas du fakir (46 letters)
Cover up the taxi-railcar tail with fakir’s pajamas.
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
8) Monsieur Jack, vous dactylographiez bien mieux que votre ami Wolf (55 letters)
Mister Jack, you type much better than your friend Wolf
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 accented)
French Pangram with all 26 letter, accented letters, and ligatures.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, the French alphabet uses accents, marks, and ligatures, which adds an additional 16 to 18 different accented letters. The following French Panagram contains them. It’s extremely difficult to type this pangram quickly on a keyboard because you have to use the shift and alt keys to get access to many of them.
From Christmas, where a hated zephyr clothes me in Würmian icicles, I dine on exquisite roast beef with matured Kir at Aÿ, and so on.
From Christmas, when a hated zephyr puts Würmian ice cubes on me, I dine on exquisite roast beef with a mature aÿ kir & etc!
It’s a little hard to translate because certain words are cultural and don’t translate well.
- kir à l’aÿ: Kir is the name of a French aperitif (French cocktail.) Aÿ is a region that makes wine and sparkling wine.
- Würmiens is a borrowed word which, as far as I can tell, means ice from the Alps during the Pleistocene period.
