The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog - wikipedia The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog The phrase shown in metal moveable type, used in printing presses ( image reversed for readability ) `` The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog '' is an English - language pangram -- a sentence that contains all of the letters of the alphabet. It is commonly used for touch - typing practice, testing typewriters and computer keyboards, displaying examples of fonts, and other applications involving text where the use of all letters in the alphabet is desired. Owing to its brevity and coherence, it has become widely known. Contents 1 History 2 Computer usage 3 Cultural references 4 See also 5 References History Item from the February 10, 1885 edition of The Boston Journal mentioning the phrase `` A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. '' The earliest known appearance of the phrase is from The Boston Journal. In an article titled `` Current Notes '' in the February 10, 1885 morning edition, the phrase is mentioned as a good practice sentence for writing students : `` A favorite copy set by writing teachers for their pupils is the following, because it contains every letter of the alphabet : ' A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. ' '' Dozens of other newspapers published the phrase over the next few months, all using the version of the sentence starting with `` A '' rather than `` The ''. The earliest known use of the phrase in its modern form ( starting with `` The '' ) is from the 1888 book Illustrative Shorthand by Linda Bronson. The modern form ( starting with `` The '' ) became more common despite the fact that it is slightly longer than the original ( starting with `` A '' ). As the use of typewriters grew in the late 19th century, the phrase began appearing in typing lesson books as a practice sentence. Early examples include How to Become Expert in Typewriting : A Complete Instructor Designed Especially for the Remington Typewriter ( 1890 ), and Typewriting Instructor and Stenographer 's Hand - book ( 1892 ). By the turn of the 20th century, the phrase had become widely known. In the January 10, 1903, issue of Pitman 's Phonetic Journal, it is referred to as `` the well known memorized typing line embracing all the letters of the alphabet ''. Robert Baden - Powell 's book Scouting for Boys ( 1908 ) uses the phrase as a practice sentence for signaling. The first message sent on the Moscow -- Washington hotline on August 30, 1963 was the test phrase `` THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG 'S BACK 1234567890 ''. Later, during testing, the Russian translators sent a message asking their American counterparts `` What does it mean when your people say ' The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog ? ' '' During the 20th century, technicians tested typewriters and teleprinters by typing the sentence. Computer usage In the age of computers, this pangram is commonly used to display font samples and for testing computer keyboards. In cryptography, it is commonly used as a test vector for hash and encryption algorithms to verify their implementation, as well as to ensure alphabetic character set compatibility. Microsoft Word has a command to auto - type the sentence, in versions up to Word 2003, using the command = rand ( ), and in Microsoft Office Word 2007 and later using the command = rand. old ( ). Examples of how the phrase is used in font display Cultural references Numerous passing references to the phrase have occurred in movies, television, books, video games, advertising, websites, and graphic arts. The lipogrammatic novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn is built entirely around the `` Quick Brown Fox '' pangram and its inventor. It depicts a fictional country off the South Carolina coast that idealizes the pangram, chronicling the effects on literature and social structure as various letters are banned from daily use by government dictum. In the fifth episode of the first season of Philip K. Dick 's Electric Dreams a character recites this phrase over and over again trying to prevent a telepath from reading his mind. See also Etaoin shrdlu Filler text Lorem ipsum References Jump up ^ `` Current Notes ''. Boston Journal ( morning ed. ). Boston, Massachusetts. February 10, 1885. p. 1. Jump up ^ `` Search for ' quick brown fox ' ''. Newspapers.com. Retrieved 8 November 2016. Jump up ^ Bronson, Linda Pennington ( 1888 ). Illustrative Shorthand. San Francisco. p. 76. Jump up ^ Barnes, Lovisa Ellen ( 1890 ). How to Become Expert in Typewriting. p. 12. Jump up ^ `` The Fox Typewriter ''. Pitman 's Phonetic Journal. January 10, 1903. Jump up ^ Baden - Powell, Robert ( 1908 ). Scouting for Boys ( PDF ). London : Pearson. ISBN 0 - 665 - 98794 - 3. Jump up ^ `` Washington Moscow Hotline ''. Cryptomuseum.com. Retrieved 2013 - 09 - 21. Jump up ^ Rusk, Dean ( 1991 ). As I Saw It : A Secretary of State 's Memoirs. London : I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. p. 225. Jump up ^ Vegter, Wobbe ( June 2007 ). `` Jean - Maurice - Émile Baudot ''. ThemNews. 8 ( 2 ). Retrieved 2013 - 09 - 21. Jump up ^ `` kb212251 Microsoft support ''. Support.microsoft.com. 2011 - 09 - 18. Retrieved 2013 - 09 - 21. Jump up ^ Ella Minnow Pea : A Novel in Letters, by Mark Dunn, Anchor, 2001, ISBN 0385722435 Standard test items Pangram Reference implementation Standard test image Television ( test card ) SMPTE color bars Indian - head test pattern Test Card F Philips PM5544 Computer languages `` Hello, World ! '' program Quine Trabb Pardo -- Knuth algorithm Man or boy test Just another Perl hacker Data compression Calgary corpus Canterbury corpus 3D computer graphics Cornell box Stanford bunny Stanford dragon Utah teapot Machine Learning ImageNet MNIST database List Typography Hamburgevons Lorem ipsum The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Other EICAR test file GTUBE Harvard sentences Lenna `` Tom 's Diner '' SMPTE universal leader EURion constellation Retrieved from `` https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_quick_brown_fox_jumps_over_the_lazy_dog&oldid=841103142 '' Categories : English phrases Filler text Pangrams Typography Hidden categories : CS1 : Julian -- Gregorian uncertainty Talk Contents About Wikipedia Bân - lâm - gú Deutsch Español فارسی Français 한국어 Bahasa Indonesia Italiano 日本 語 Português Русский Українська Tiếng Việt 吴语 中文 6 more Edit links This page was last edited on 14 May 2018, at 03 : 00. 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Question: the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog meaning
Answer: contains all of the letters of the alphabet.