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Pangram Checker

A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet, and the hard part is not checking one but writing one — you end up hunting for a home for J, Q, X and Z long after the rest is done. This names exactly which letters a sentence still lacks, counts every letter so you can see where the waste is, and then assembles a pangram from a word list of your own by repeatedly taking whichever word adds the most letters still missing.

What this generator does

Counts every letter in the sentence, lists the ones that never appear, and reports how many letters a pangram spends beyond the twenty-six a perfect one would use. Given a word list it then builds a pangram by taking, each time, whichever word covers the most letters still needed.

How to use this tool

  1. Type or paste the sentence you want to check.
  2. Read which letters are missing, if any.
  3. Put a word list underneath to build from.
  4. Read the pangram it assembles, and how many letters it spends.

Understanding the controls

Sentence to check
Anything you like. Case, digits and punctuation are ignored, so only the twenty-six letters count towards the verdict.
Word list to build from
One word per line. The build takes whichever word adds the most missing letters at each step, so a list with no Q or Z will be told plainly that it cannot cover the alphabet.

Common use cases

  • Checking whether a sentence you have written is a pangram
  • Finding which letters a near-miss is short of
  • Building a pangram from a themed word list for a puzzle or a card
  • Testing a typeface or a keyboard with a sentence covering every letter
  • Seeing how far from a perfect pangram a sentence is

How this generator works

Checking is a matter of counting, and the counts are recomputed from the text before display rather than carried over from the pass that produced them. Building is set cover: each word covers a set of letters, and you want a small collection of words covering all twenty-six. Choosing the word that adds the most missing letters each time is the greedy method, which is not guaranteed to find the shortest possible pangram — no quick method is, for this problem — but it gets close. Every word it picks is then checked to earn its place: remove it and a letter goes missing.

Randomness and fairness

Nothing here is random. A sentence has exactly one set of missing letters, and the same word list always builds the same pangram.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Limitations and good to know

  • Greedy set cover is not guaranteed to find the shortest pangram from your list, and the page says so rather than claiming an optimum it has not proved.
  • Only the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet are counted; accents and other scripts are ignored rather than mapped to a base letter.
  • A perfect pangram — every letter exactly once — is very rare in English and this will not find one unless your word list contains it.
  • Building only ever uses whole words from your list, so it cannot invent the unusual proper nouns most published perfect pangrams rely on.

Privacy and your data

The checking runs in your browser and the sentence and words you enter are never transmitted, stored or included in analytics.