Type designers love a good pangram. Pangrams, of course, are sentences that contain each letter of the alphabet at least once, of which the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is surely the most famous. Lettering artists of the previous generation bequeathed us jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz; puzzlers are fond of the impossibly compact Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx for its 26-letter world record. Sometime in the early nineties, I whiled away an entire afternoon in a San Francisco café coming up with a bunch of my own, honoring typeface designers (mix Zapf with Veljović and get quirky Béziers), and philosophers (you go tell that vapid existentialist quack Freddy Nietzsche that he can just bite me, twice), and the uplifting grace of a cosmos in balance (Wham! Volcano erupts fiery liquid death onto ex-jazzbo Kenny G.) Pangrams are unctuous little brain ticklers, challenging to concoct, droll to read, and immensely popular for presenting fonts.

I find them singularly useless in type design, and I don’t use them in my work.

The Problem with Pangrams

In years past, our proofs were full of pangrammatic foxes and lynxes and the rest, which made for some very merry reading. But invariably, I’d find myself staring down a lowercase J, and if I questioned the amount of space assigned to its left side, I’d set off in search of some confirmation in the proof. Each time, I’d be reminded that while pangrams delivered all kinds of jocks and japes and jutes and judges, even our prodigious list featured not a single word with a J in the middle.¹ I also started to notice that Xs had an unusually strong affinity for Ys in pangrams, because pangrams make a sport of concision. Words like foxy and oxygen deliver real bang for your buck if you’re out to craft a compact sentence, but to the typeface designer noticing that the pair XY looks consistently wrong, none of these words will reveal which letter is at fault. I’d find myself rewriting the pangrams, popping in an occasional ‘doxology’ to see if the X was balanced between round letters, or ‘dynamo’ to review the Y between flat ones.

The far more pernicious issue with pangrams, as a means for evaluating typefaces, is how poorly they portray what text actually looks like. Every language has a natural distribution of letters, from most to least common, English famously beginning with the E that accounts for one eighth of what we read, and ending with the Z that appears just once every 1,111 letters.² Letter frequencies differ by language and by era — the J is ten times more popular in Dutch than English; biblical English unduly favors the H thanks to archaisms like thou and sayeth — but no language behaves the way pangrams do, with their forced distribution of exotics. Seven of the most visually awkward letters, the W, Y, V, K, X, J, and Z, are among the nine rarest in English, but pangrams force them into every sentence, guaranteeing that every paragraph will be riddled with holes. A typeface designer certainly can’t avoid accounting for these unruly characters, but there’s no reason that they should be disproportionately represented when evaluating how a typeface will perform.

A New Approach

In 2015, I dumped the pangrams we’d accumulated and rewrote our proofs from scratch, trading their wacky and self-satisfied cleverness for lists of words that are actually illustrative. My initial goal was to show each letter between flat- and round-sided neighbors, to illustrate categorically how each letter was spaced. (While drawing, type designers use strings such as nnsnonosoo to evaluate how a lowercase s fits between flat letters and round ones, judged by evaluating the fragments nsn and oso. Elsewhere in this string are three ‘control’ textures: the all-flat nn, the all-round oo, and the mixed-shape nono, which offer a baseline against which to measure any turbulence caused by the s.) Anecdotally, I know that the words ‘ensnare’ and ‘boson’ illustrate these same relationships, so I set about finding words that were similarly useful for the rest of the alphabet, using a combination of algorithmic dictionary searches and personal preference.

I also thought it might be useful if our proofs demonstrated each letter at the start of a word, and at the end, and also — crucially — doubled: letters like s and g take on mysterious properties once they start to accumulate, making words like ‘missing’ and ‘buggy’ often illuminating. (Some German-speaking typographers call these ‘schnapps-words,’ an endearing tribute to boozy double-vision. Satisfyingly, schnapps is itself a schnapps-word.) Even better than the schnapps-word ‘buggy,’ which positions the gg pair next to an awkward y, would be something with a neutral context: the word ‘smuggle’ does the job, with its flat-sided u and l.

But most importantly, I wanted to organize the text logically, so that instead of spending a whole afternoon stalking a wild K in the bush, I’d always know exactly where to find it. I thought I might further ease the process by choosing words that were familiar, comfortable to read, easy to remember, and easy to hear over the phone, to provide a little succor before the project of kerning individual pairs of letters would begin, and we’d find ourselves exiled to a bloodcurdling realm of Grijpskerks and Quijquemeyas.

Finally, I wanted the text to have the visual cadences of my native English, in which words of variable but digestible length are punctuated by shorter ones. Type, after all, should be something that you want to read.

Here’s the result:

How to use this proof

The new proof begins with each of the capital letters bounded by flat-sided and round-sided neighbors: the capital A up against the flat side of the n, and then the round side of the d, in the pair ‘Angel Adept.’ This pattern continues through the Z, with ‘Zloty Zodiac.’

From here, each sentence begins with a capital letter, in alphabetical order, making things easy to locate: everything connected with the lowercase K, for example, is in the ‘K-sentence,’ which begins with the capital-K ‘Knoll.’ The sentence includes examples of this letter at the head of a word, bordering flat and round neighbors (‘knoll koala’), and then between flat and round letters (‘banknote lookout’), where we can categorically see how they’re fitted with typographically-neutral forms. Each sentence proceeds to show the letter at the ends of words (‘dybbuk outlook’), and concludes with a schnapps-word (‘trekked’). I’ve sprinkled the proof with short fragments of connective tissue (and, of the, for the) to produce a pattern that’s plausibly comparable to real text, useful for those many times when the goal is not to evaluate the behavior of an individual letter, but rather to take in the text en masse, to appreciate its rhythm, its color, and its texture.

Because the text favors plain-sided letters for context — the hs and ns and ms delightfully known as ‘typographical sirloin’³  — it consequently uses fewer characters with awkward silhouettes. This applies not only to the edge-case v, w, and y, with their diagonal profiles, but also the more common e, t, r, and c that are unavoidably cavernous on their right sides. (The omission of familiar letters always passes without notice, as lipogrammeur George Perec wickedly demonstrated in La Disparition, his 300-page novel written entirely without the benefit of the letter e.) Because the new font proofs overrepresent these neutral letters, they produce an unusually calm rhythm, which helps to cast into especially sharp relief any problems with individual letters. That is, any issues with the b should be immediately apparent from a mere glance at the B-sentence, where, amidst the agreeable sirloin, there is a concentration of the letter b nine times greater than in typical English prose.

Further Variations

Because upper- and lowercase letters have different properties — a lowercase d is round on the left and flat on the right, the exact opposite of a capital D — I’ve put together additional proofs for evaluating both capitals and small caps. These follow the same underlying scheme as the lowercase proof, and are designed to be used the same way: K-related issues are best evaluated by the K-sentence, which is alphabetized under K.

Best Practices

Because so many combinations appear more than once, it’s tempting to make notes wherever something is noticed, but I’ve found it useful to develop some discipline around this. If you’re in the K-sentence, and the rogue double O in ‘logbook’ stands out, it’s best to confirm this observation in the O-sentence, where the word ‘hooded’ unequivocally reveals whether or not these letters are behaving. This not only has the benefit of demonstrating the OO pair in a typographically neutral context — framed by a flat-sided H and D, and undisturbed by the open space of the B in ‘logbook’ — it also helps you find your own notes, by keeping all your comments about the O together in the O-sentence.

Finally, there’s a proof for the small caps, whose text essentially duplicates the behavior of the capitals, with an additional section on top. In the words ‘Abide Acorn Anaheim,’ we have not only a capital A next to flat and round small caps (Ab, Ac), but also the word ‘Anaheim’ for comparing the capital and small cap forms in close proximity. These are included for every letter: ‘Babcock, Cocoon, Didion, Energetic,’ etc.

I’m making these texts available with the hope that they’ll be useful to anyone looking critically at type, most of all the designers with whom I’ve been conducting free type clinics on social media. I’d welcome anyone’s contributions or extensions: more than once, I’ve found myself wondering what speakers of other languages, and readers of other script systems, might do with this approach.

My thanks to Lydia Hill for illustrating some of the beloved denizens of Camp Pangram, like the breezy kinkajou, piqued zebra, and warm-hearted hyrax above. I feel better about booting them from the font proofs, knowing that they’ll forever inhabit this dazzling realm of hyacinths, foxgloves, and jonquils, if you’ll permit me this one, final pangram. —JH

Notes

1. The letter J, rare in English to begin with, tends to appear in the company of familiar prefixes or suffixes. To the pangrammer, everyday words like conjunction, injurious or subjective are wasteful, because they burn too many commonplace letters in support of a single curio. Therefore jowl, jib, and the highly suspect jynx. For a time, I thought the mid-word J in my ‘Veljović’ pangram might help, but quickly discovered that in all capitals, the unfittable pair LJ is spectacularly distracting. I sympathize with the typographers of Ljubljana.

2. Letter frequencies have been calculated since at least the ninth century, and crop up in the most unexpected places: Etaoin Shrdlu, the leftmost rows of the Linotype keyboard, merits an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. The values I cite were calculated by computer scientist Peter Norvig, whose 2012 analysis measured a massive corpus containing more than 3.5 trillion letters.

3. Thomas Frognall Dibdin coined this fetching term in his Bibliographical Decameron of 1817. I learned it from Alphabets to Order by Alastair Johnston, a splendid book that cheekily (but learnedly) assesses type specimen books not as typographic artifacts, but as literary works. It was nineteenth century typefounder Edmund Fry who Dibdin noted for his helpings of sirloin, his specimen books bedecked with square-shouldered words like maine and men and him that craftily avoided awkward gaps and collisions.