The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
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Image:Kfontview.png The phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" (or "A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", or any of several similar sentences) has been used to test typewriters and computer keyboards, because it is a coherent, short pangram (a phrase that uses every letter of the alphabet).
Previously, the sentence was often used for testing the teletype services. In the age of computers, the sentence is often used as a sample text in font selection contexts.
This sentence is frequently mis-quoted as "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", which does not contain all the letters of the alphabet since it lacks the letter "s". For this reason, the word "slow" or "sleeping" is sometimes inserted into the phrase, or the word "dog" is made plural.
The sentence has been used by Microsoft to display fonts since the original release of Microsoft Word, resulting in enormous world-wide exposure to the pangram. In addition to being short and intelligible, the phrase was also chosen by many others since it describes a neutral, bland event which is unlikely to offend anyone.
The phrase "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country" has also been used to test the skills of keyboardists, but is not a pangram.
Trivia
- In the novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, the inventor of the phrase lives on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina.
- In the novel The Dark Half by Stephen King, the psychotic writer/ghost George Stark almost goes on a rampage through a public library when he discovers in the library's typing room that he has a form of writer's block featuring the pangram. No matter what he tries to type, his fingers end up typing the phrase, over and over again.
- The phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" can be generated 15 times in the English Microsoft Word by typing =rand() and pressing the ENTER key. N paragraphs each containing the phrase M times can be generated by typing =rand(N,M) and pressing the ENTER key, where N and M are entered as the desired numbers. For example =rand(2,3) creates 2 paragraphs with each paragraph repeating the phrase 3 times.
- A card was made in the card game Magic: The Gathering with a flavor text quote "The quick onyx goblin jumps over the lazy dwarf." The card was called "Now I know my ABC's", and was itself a joke card from Magic's Unhinged series, a set of all humorous and nonsense cards not actually meant for serious play.