The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Phrase traditionally used for typography tests as it contains every letter in the latin alphabet.

Starting off a recent round of Eat Poop You Cat, this common phrase was retained through texto-pictoral conversion and back for a surprising number of steps before spinning off into an abyss of meme-loss.

• 1. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
• 3. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
• 5. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
• 7. A cat and dog were running at each other and the cat jumped to avoid a collision.
• 9. One of the two mice decided to display his graceful leaping skills to the other.
• 11. Dennis Franz was tossed out of the Mousketeers when he threw a colleague onto a bed of nails.
• 13. The networks asked Disney to sell ABC after NYPD Blue's Dennis Franz threw Mickey Mouse into a pit of spikes.
• 15. The bear was happy because he got money for setting off fireworks but then he had to be taken to New York by ambulance.
• 17. Bribing Koalas to remain illegally in one place. Trees anchor me in place. / Your mom drives the ambulance, but the city is farther than it appears.
• 19. I'm gonna bribe a bunny rabbit to drive me in an ambulance to the pier where I will get on my sailboat.
• 21. A man bribes a rabbit with wicked dentures to run away with him in a sailboat via an ambulance.

There's also a Mac-related phrase that is used sometimes:

The crazed office worker began an evil shooting rampage just after trying to install QuickDraw GX.

There's one that is used by the US Navy in testing their computer displays in SH-60B helicopters:

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs

This also has every letter, and it reminds the military folks who are out to sea that they can't get drunk.

Microsoft Office, like everything else in this world, needs to be maintained and tested. Doing this was my job in a previous life. There is a built in "hack" to Word (and a couple of the drawing objects) that display this phrase. Simply type:

=RAND(*,*)

It will draw this phrase where the first star is the number of times per paragraph, and the second star is the number of paragraphs. It was really handy in things like testing font metrics and stuff, because you could see all of the characters onscreen at once. Personally, this was much more desirable to add stuff to a document really fast than "asdasdasdasdasdasdasd" or whatever else we'd use to verify a piece of code.

Legal Notice: This is a well known Microsoft Word trick, and published elsewhere, and thus does not violate any confidentiality agreementst that I hold with Microsoft Corporation..

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is a sentence that uses every letter in the Latin alphabet at least once. As such, it is frequently used for typography tests and, by the nature of its including every letter in the alphabet, is called a pangram ("all letters"). It is believed to be the most popular pangram in use for several reasons, among them the fact that it is short and easy to remember and the fact that it has been in use for so long.

The phrase first came into being when Western Union needed something short and concise that would effectively test all the characters on its communications equipment. It has been suggested on several message boards and forums that the original test phrase was "The quick brown fox jumped over a lazy dog's back 1234567890 times," so that the numbers could also be tested.

While "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is probably the most oft-used English pangram today, other languages have their own share of these phrases. The lazy dog pangram is used in Microsoft Windows font files in order to depict what every letter looks like in that particular font. Similarly, several font download websites use the phrase as a default for the same reasons. Some, such as daFont, allow the user to enter their own text to replace the pangram -- that way, they don't need to download the font in order to see how a different phrase appears.

Using a Windows installation in another language? Microsoft uses a number of pangrams in other languages as well. Wikipedia also has a comprehensive list of multilingual pangrams. Those in languages that use different alphabets are perhaps the most interesting, as certain alphabets (such as the Cyrillic alphabet) evolved over time to include new letters. The pangrams originated during the days of telegraph usage, often before new letters were used.

If I'm not mistaken, Apple products use a similar format when displaying fonts, but with a different pangram. If anyone could elaborate on this, I'd appreciate it.

The phrase also took on new life as part of Threadless's "Joy of Text" competition. An Australian artist named Pascal Hoayek placed third with his depiction of a quick brown fox jumping over a lazy dog on a yellow background -- the animals were formed by the letters that spelled out the phrase. This has remained one of Threadless's best-selling designs to date; it is currently sold out and a number of the site's users are clamouring for a reprint. Hoayek called his design "=rand( )," a reference to the Microsoft Word "hack" that jaybonci alluded to above -- typing "=rand()" into Word and hitting enter produces the phrase automatically.

Resources:

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http://www.creativebehavior.com/index.php?PID=172
An OnTrack forum with a particularly long URL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram