A pangram is a sentence that uses all 26 letters of the alphabet. In addition to being nice bits of wordplay in their own right, pangrams are also useful to the calligrapher seeking to practice writing all the letters. A perfect pangram is one that uses each of the 26 letters exactly once. In practice, the imperfect pangrams tend to be more interesting.

A few of my favorite pangrams:

A quick movement of the enemy will jeopardize six gunboats.

About sixty codfish eggs will make a quarter pound of very fizzy jelly.

An inspired calligrapher can create pages of beauty using stick ink, quill, brush, pick-axe, buzz saw, or even strawberry jam.

Brawny gods just flocked up to quiz and vex him.

Ebenezer unexpectedly bagged two tranquil aardvarks with his jiffy vacuum cleaner.

Five big quacking zephyrs jolt my wax bed.

How quickly daft jumping zebras vex.

Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

Quick zephyrs blow, vexing daft Jim.

The sex life of the woodchuck is a provocative question for most vertebrate zoology majors.

Wolfing kumquats, jovial Charon poled his boat lazily along the Styx.

All of these have more than 26 letters. To get to a perfect pangram, you really need to stretch the bounds of the English language. Here are four examples:

Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz.

TV quiz drag nymphs blew JFK cox.

Blowzy night-frumps vex'd Jack Q.

Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx.

Some people refer to pangrams as holoalphabetic sentences. Some people call a spade a digging implement with a steel blade, too.