Guide

What makes a pangram

The word means "every letter", and it names two different games. The sentence kind uses all twenty-six letters of the alphabet. THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG is the one everybody knows, and the sport is making them shorter. The puzzle kind belongs to seven-letter honeycomb games, where a pangram is a word that uses all seven of the day's letters at least once, and finding it is the puzzle's crown.

The puzzle kind can be counted on this site's own dictionary, Word Sieve's ENABLE1-derived edition with 39 entries excluded. It holds 37,869 words of seven letters or more built from exactly seven distinct letters, the full pool a honeycomb pangram can be drawn from. Of those, 7,655 are perfect: exactly seven letters long, with every letter used once. The other 30,214 repeat at least one letter; 12,279 of them have eight letters, and the two longest, COCCIDIOIDOMYCOSIS and DISINTERESTEDNESSES, run to 18 and 19. A puzzle's own curated dictionary is smaller and pickier, so its counts differ.

Hunting one

A pangram hunt is an unscrambling problem with a floor: the answer must be at least seven letters long and must use every letter in the set. Sort the letters, place the awkward one first, and let the suffixes do the stretching. Of the 37,869 candidates, 14,529 end in S, 3,327 in ED, 2,917 in ING and 1,769 in ER. A six-letter stem that uses six of the seven letters usually reaches the seventh through -S, -ED, -ER or -ING, and checking those four endings by hand is faster than re-dealing the rack.

Type the seven letters into the word finder once each, and its seven-letter results are the perfect pangrams: for A, E, I, N, R, S and T there are nine, RETINAS and NASTIER among them. The finder uses each letter only as often as you type it, so a longer pangram such as RESTRAIN, which needs a second R, appears only if you type the extra copy or add a ? blank (it takes up to two). A blank can stand for any letter, so check that each result stays inside the set. The five-letter list is the wrong tool here, since every honeycomb pangram is at least seven letters long.

Start from the rare letter

Among the 37,869 candidates, J appears in only 504, Q in 608, X in 896 and Z in 1,157, the four rarest letters in the pool. A honeycomb puzzle showing J or Q has already ruled out most of the candidates, so start the hunt from that letter and its few partners. In all 504 J candidates the J sits next to a vowel, which narrows the search further. The word finder's contains box turns this into a quick test, and the word maker scores the same rack in points if your game counts them.

The sentence game, briefly

The fox sentence has thirty-five letters, because some of them repeat. A perfect pangram uses each of the twenty-six exactly once, which often makes the wording awkward. Rare letters constrain both kinds, and they are the same four: J, Q, X and Z.