'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog': almost everyone knows that this is - or is anyway believed to be - one of the shortest sentences in the English language to use all 26 letters of the alphabet (although the simple variant 'A quick brown fox ...' is shorter still). Not nearly so many know that the technical name for this type of sentence is a pangram; and most of those possessed of such recondite knowledge will probably be members or admirers of the Oulipo, that remarkable Paris-based group dedicated to research and development in the sphere of literary forms. The Holy Grail of the pangrammatists is the isopangram, which uses each letter once and once only; sadly, most of the English examples produced to date read like poor translations from the Martian: 'Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz' or 'Nth black fjords vex Qum gyp wiz.'

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