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. This phrase is also used in showing all the collections of letters in fonts. Microsoft Word has a command to auto-type the sentence, in versions up to Word 2003, using the command , and in Microsoft Office Word 2007 and later using the command . 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) "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow." (29 letters) "How vexingly quick daft zebras jump!" (30 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". See also Filler text References External links English phrases Filler text Pangrams Typography 1880s neologisms