Georg M. Goerg

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What all the pangrams say about how people play

I went through the public Pangramble leaderboard. Everyone reaches for QUICK, FOX and JAZZ, and the shortest sentences use made-up words.

Pangramble gives you three words each day and asks for a sentence that includes them and uses all 26 letters. Fewer letters is a better score. I went through the public leaderboard submissions, and here are some of the things that stood out in this unusual dataset, probably one of the largest collections of English pangrams ever written.

Letter frequency in pangrams compared with ordinary English

Everyone reaches for the same words. QUICK and FOX turn up again and again, with QUICKLY and QUIZ not far behind. The hard letters are Q, X, Z and J, and QUIZ and JAZZ cover most of them. Compared with ordinary English, Z is used about 30 times more than normal and Q about 18 times, while H, T and S fall to about half to two thirds of their usual rate. Pangrams spend their letters on Q, X, Z and J and save on words like “the” and “that”. A few players pasted “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and added the seed words on the end.

The most-used words. Every sentence has to contain that day’s three seed words, so I left those out and ranked the rest by how many different players used them. After the small words (the, a, and, to, my, with, of, in) the list goes: QUICK, FOX, QUICKLY, QUIZ, JUST, LAZY, ZOO, VERY, BOX, JAZZ, ZEBRA, JAZZY, OVER, QUITE.

Words two people found. Words that turn up only once are often typos or made-up filler. So I looked at words used by exactly two different players, kept the ones in a standard English word list, and sorted them by how rare they are in everyday English. The rarest ten: QUIXOTICALLY, QUAVER, QUAINTLY, PYJAMA, QUIXOTIC, BOZO, YULE, JUSTLY, JACKAL, QUIXOTE. Two people each wrote QUIXOTICALLY, which gets the Q and the X in one word.

The shortest ones use made-up words. The record is 33 letters:

SPELL ‘BIG FAXED JUCK’ TO GOVERN MY QI WHIZ.

“Juck” isn’t a word. The game checks letters, not a dictionary. The shortest phrase I found with only real words is 34 letters:

BELT HEAVY KING QUIZ PROMS FIXED JACK NEW

That isn’t really a sentence, though. The words are real, but it doesn’t mean anything and isn’t grammatical. Actually grammatically meaningful sentences take more letters, and they’re more fun to read, so here are a few of them with AI-generated illustrations (which you can get automatically at pangramble.com).

Some of the more interesting ones:

  • A PYJAMA FINDS A RUG SHELL BOX WITHIN A QUICK SAND ZINC CAVE. (48)

    Illustration: a flat-colour poster of a person in blue striped pyjamas kneeling in a cave with a shell-covered box, headed “EXPLORE THE ZINC CAVES” with the line “DISCOVER THE SHELL BOX”

  • MY OFFICIAL NOVEL WAS JUST EXCLUDING A BRIGHT QUICK PIZZA. (48)

    Illustration: hands reaching for pepperoni pizza at a sidewalk table, next to a book called The Unfinished Chapter, under neon pizza signs

  • THE CLOCK CHIMS AT A QUARTER TIL TWO AND THE FOX PARALLEL TO THE ZOO GIVES THANKS TO THE JABBERWOCKY (81; CHIMS is the player’s spelling. With spaces, it’s exactly 100 characters.)

    Illustration: a fox beside a clock tower in a moonlit park

Smoothed distribution of scores: a main hump in the 40s and 50s with the median at 54 letters, and a second hump around 80 letters, made up of long sentences that end just under the 100-character input limit

Scores have two humps. The median is 54 letters. The second hump, around 80, is people who wrote a long, ordinary sentence instead of a tight pangram. The game’s 100-character limit, which counts spaces, caps them: 100 characters leaves room for about 84 letters, and that’s where the hump stops. Only a few sentences are right at the limit; most stop a little short of it. It isn’t the “quick brown fox” sentences either. Those score in the 60s, in the dip between the two humps.

Today’s puzzle is at pangramble.com. How I built it is on the project page.