Famous pangram and placeholder text: The Quick Brown Fox and Lorem Ipsum

## The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is an English-language pangram — a sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet. The phrase 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.

### History

The earliest known appearance of the phrase was in The Boston Journal. In an article titled "Current Notes" in the February 9, 1885, 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 starting with "The" is from the 1888 book Illustrative Shorthand by Linda Bronson. The modern form (starting with "The") became more common even though it is slightly longer than the original (starting with "A").

A 1908 edition of the Los Angeles Herald Sunday Magazine records that when the New York Herald was equipping an office with typewriters "a few years ago", staff found that the common practice sentence of "now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party" did not familiarize typists with the entire alphabet, and ran onto two lines in a newspaper column. They write that a staff member named Arthur F. Curtis invented the "quick brown fox" pangram to address this.

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.

It is the sentence used in the annual Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Competition, a cursive writing competition which has been held in the U.S. since 1991.

### 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().

### Cultural references

Numerous 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 island 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.

### Other pangrams

With 35 letters, this is not the shortest pangram. Shorter examples include:

* "Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex." (28 letters)
* "How vexingly quick daft zebras jump!" (30 letters)
* "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs." (32 letters)

If abbreviations and non-dictionary words are allowed, it is possible to create a perfect pangram that uses each letter only once, such as "Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx".

## Lorem Ipsum

In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. Lorem ipsum may be used as a placeholder before final copy is available. It is also used to temporarily replace text in a process called greeking, which allows designers to consider the form of a webpage or publication, without the meaning of the text influencing the design.

Lorem ipsum is typically a corrupted version of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC text by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical and improper Latin. The first two words themselves are a truncation of 'dolorem ipsum' ('pain itself').

Versions of the Lorem ipsum text have been used in typesetting at least since the 1960s, when it was popularized by advertisements for Letraset transfer sheets. Lorem ipsum was introduced to the digital world in the mid-1980s, when Aldus employed it in graphic and word-processing templates for its desktop publishing program PageMaker. Other popular word processors, including Pages and Microsoft Word, have since adopted Lorem ipsum, as have many LaTeX packages, web content managers such as Joomla! and WordPress, and CSS libraries such as Semantic UI.

### Example text

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

### Source text

The Lorem ipsum text is derived from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero's 'De finibus bonorum et malorum'. The physical source may have been the 1914 Loeb Classical Library edition of De finibus, where the Latin text, presented on the left-hand (even) pages, breaks off on page 34 with "Neque porro quisquam est qui do-" and continues on page 36 with "lorem ipsum ...", suggesting that the galley type of that page was mixed up to make the dummy text seen today.

The discovery of the text's origin is attributed to Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden–Sydney College. McClintock connected Lorem ipsum to Cicero's writing sometime before 1982 while searching for instances of the Latin word consectetur, which was rarely used in classical literature. McClintock first published his discovery in a 1994 letter to the editor of Before & After magazine, contesting the editor's earlier claim that Lorem ipsum held no meaning.

The relevant section of Cicero as printed in the source is reproduced below with fragments used in Lorem ipsum underlined. Letters in brackets were added to Lorem ipsum and were not present in the source text:

Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa, quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt, explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet consectetur adipisci[ng] velit, sed quia non numquam [do] eius modi tempora inci[di]dunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum[d] exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? [D]Quis autem vel eum i[r]ure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur? At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus, qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti, quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint, obcaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa, qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio. Nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio, cumque nihil impedit, quo minus id, quod maxime placeat, facere possimus, omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis dolor repellendus. Temporibus autem quibusdam et aut officiis debitis aut rerum necessitatibus saepe eveniet, ut et voluptates repudiandae sint et molestiae non recusandae. Itaque earum rerum hic tenetur a sapiente delectus, ut aut reiciendis voluptatibus maiores alias consequatur aut perferendis doloribus asperiores repellat.

What follows is H. Rackham's translation, as printed in the 1914 Loeb edition.

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of reprobating pleasure and extolling pain arose. To do so, I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure? On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.

### Uncorrupted version: **De finibus bonorum et malorum** ("On the ends of good and evil")

#### Contents

##### First and second books (Liber Primus and Liber Secundus)

The first two books are a dialogue set at Cicero's country home in Cumae between himself and a young Epicurean named Lucius Torquatus, while another young Roman named Gaius Triarius listens on. In the first book, the interlocutors present the Epicurean theory of hedonism, which holds that pleasure in the form of aponia (absence of pain) is regarded as the highest good. In the second book, Cicero criticizes this view, attacking the Epicurean definition of pleasure and arguing that it is inconsistent to hold pleasure as the absence of pain as the final good, since these are not one single good, but rather two distinct goods.

##### Third and fourth books (Liber Tertius and Liber Quartus)

In the next two books Stoic ethics are discussed. In the third book Cicero's interlocutor, Marcus Porcius Cato, presents Stoic doctrine. Here Cicero introduces the technical terms used by the Stoics into Latin. The highest and only good of the Stoics is virtue (moral good). In the fourth book, Cicero casts doubt on this dogma, arguing a supposed natural state (the "cradle argument"), as well as issues regarding the exclusion of other goods entailed by Stoic doctrine.

##### Fifth book (Liber Quintus)

In the last book Cicero presents in the form of a dialogue between himself and several friends the theory of eudaimonia taught by Antiochus of Ascalon, which treats Aristotelianism as a subgroup of Platonism. This theory includes both virtue and external goods as the highest good. At the end of the book, Cicero criticized logical inconsistencies of this teaching, but more briefly and only addressing details, not broader principles. Cicero then declares that he follows this school of thought, albeit not without reservations, while respecting the valuable aspects of the teachings presented in the previous books.