The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog – perhaps the most famous of all pangrams. They’re sentences which use every letter of the alphabet at least once. In English many of these tend to use some of the same words frequently (vex in particular comes to mind). There’s still plenty of creativity to be found if you forego the ‘perfect’ pangram and use some letters more than once.

Some of my favourites:

• The five boxing wizards jump quickly.
• How vexingly quick daft zebras jump!
• Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

Don’t miss: Richard Rutter saved a huge list pangrams in English and other languages after they were deleted from Wikipedia.