The phrase The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog or A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog was frequently used to test typewriters, because it was a coherent short sentence which used all the letters in the English language alphabet. Such a sentence is called a pangram.
Only the letters "a", "e", "o", "r", and "u" are used more than once, each being used twice except for "o" which is used four times.
In the age of computers, the sentence is often used as a sample text in font selection contexts. It is also used on occasion as an exemplary meta-sentence .
This sentence is frequently mis-quoted as "The quick brown fox jumped over a lazy dog", which does not contain all the letters of the alphabet as the letter "s" is missing.
In the novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn , the inventor of the phrase lives on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina.
This phrase can be generated in Microsoft Word by typing =rand() and pressing the ENTER key.
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