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Pangrams and Lorem Ipsum
What the heck is a pangram? The word pangram comes from the Greek for all letters (pan = ALL + grámma = LETTER). A pangram is a series of words that form a sentence which contains all the letters of the alphabet.
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By far the most famous pangram:
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For many years pangrams have had a practical application in graphic design, with such sentences used as specimen text for designers, printers and typographers (typeface designers).
Examples of other pangrams:
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs
Sympathizing would fix Quaker objectives
Brawny gods just flocked up to quiz and vex him
Playing jazz vibe chords quickly excites my wife
Sixty zippers were quickly picked from the woven jute bag
How vexing a fumble to drop a jolly zucchini in the quicksand
Lorem Ipsum Dolor...
Nearly 500 years ago a printer scrambled some type to produce the first pangram for a type book. The text was in Latin, and so only 23 letters were needed (Latin doesn't use J , V or W; however, V is now used to represent the consonantal U, and sometimes J to represent consonantal I).
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,
diam nonnumy eiusmod tempor incidunt ut labore et dolo...
The sentence is basically gibberish, even in Latin, but it turns out that it is composed from fragments of a passage in Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (45 BC):
Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum
quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...
This translates as "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it, and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..."
It's all Greek to me!
So why use nonsensical Latin? Aside from using a pangram, the text is used as dummy text in design layouts or type samples, because it emulates the word lengths of regular English text, without the distraction of any meaning. The odd thing is that "lorem ipsum" dummy text is usually referred to as Greek or Greeking (noun). |
