Panning for Pangrams: The Search for the New Quick Brown Fox

Pangrams are a fun piece of word play. They are sentences that include every letter in the alphabet. Obviously there are plenty but here are some of the more “famous” ones:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the evil queen and jack
The five boxing wizards jump quickly

And frankly, they are great at what they do, which is usually demonstrate what a font will look like. But they aren’t perfect and they sure aren’t very casual — I doubt anyone would say these phrases. So I wanted to find my own that was made of words that people actually say; I’d need a large database of text that is somewhere in the range of 26-50 characters long. The answer was tweets. Lots and lots of tweets.

Getting a database of tweets is illegal (or against their Terms of Service) so I had to mine the tweets myself. It is an ongoing process but as of now I have ~1,000,000 tweets thanks to MyTwitterScraper. These were subjected them to a scoring algorithm and the top 15 are reported. Here are the scoring rules:

Each unique alphabetic character: + 9 points
Each repeated character or punctuation: -1 point
Including a URL or @: Zeros entire score

Split into 1000 bins this is what the distribution looks like:

Histogram of Scored Tweets

Histogram

And of the million, here are the best pangrams:

1: [‘?????????????????????the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog??????????????????’]

Score: 182
UniqueChar: 26
TotalNonSpaceChar: 78

2: [‘I just got an update from Voxer…talk about a throwback’]

Score: 179
UniqueChar: 23
TotalNonSpaceChar: 51

3: [‘Why the fuck did al- farouq aminu just get paid?’]

Score: 177
UniqueChar: 22
TotalNonSpaceChar: 43

4: [‘Mba undertow the sway sought forth thanks to advance aspirants: RMzUXml’]

Score: 175
UniqueChar: 24
TotalNonSpaceChar: 65

5: [‘Up here at Fox making up for my lack of BBQ yesterday’]

Score: 174
UniqueChar: 22
TotalNonSpaceChar: 46

So there ya go! I doubt “I just got an update from Voxer…talk about a throwback” will catch on as the pangram (also because it fails) but it remains pretty interesting

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