A farewell to The Quick Brown Fox.
Illustration by Lydia Hill
Type designers love a good pangram. Pangrams, of course, are sentences that contain each letter of the alphabet at least once, of which the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is surely the most famous. Lettering artists of the previous generation bequeathed us jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz; puzzlers are fond of the impossibly compact Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx for its 26-letter world record. Some time in the early nineties, I whiled away an entire afternoon in a San Francisco café coming up with a bunch of my own, honoring typeface designers (mix Zapf with Veljović and get quirky Béziers), and philosophers (you go tell that vapid existentialist quack Freddy Nietzsche that he can just bite me, twice), and the uplifting grace of a cosmos in balance (Wham! Volcano erupts fiery liquid death onto ex-jazzbo Kenny G.) Pangrams are unctuous little brain ticklers, challenging to concoct, droll to read, and immensely popular for presenting fonts.
I find them singularly useless in type design, and I don’t use them in my work.
In years past, our proofs were full of pangrammatic foxes and lynxes and the rest, which made for some very merry reading. But invariably, I’d find myself staring down a lowercase J — and if I questioned the amount of space assigned to its left side, I’d set off in search of some confirmation in the proof. Each time, I’d be reminded that while pangrams delivered all kinds of jocks and japes and jutes and judges, even our prodigious list featured not a single word with a J in the middle.¹1 The letter J, rare in English to begin with, tends to appear in the company of familiar prefixes or suffixes. To the pangrammer, everyday words like conjunction, injurious or subjective are wasteful, because they burn too many commonplace letters in support of a single curio. Therefore jowl, jib, and the highly suspect jynx. For a time, I thought the mid-word J in my ‘Veljović’ pangram might help, but quickly discovered that in all capitals, the unfittable pair LJ is spectacularly distracting. I sympathize with the typographers of Ljubljana. I also started to notice that Xs had an unusually strong affinity for Ys in pangrams, because pangrams make a sport of concision. Words like foxy and oxygen deliver real bang for your buck if you’re out to craft a compact sentence, but to the typeface designer noticing that the pair XY looks consistently wrong, none of these words will reveal which letter is at fault. I’d find myself rewriting the pangrams, popping in an occasional ‘doxology’ to see if the X was balanced between round letters, or ‘dynamo’ to review the Y between flat ones.
The far more pernicious issue with pangrams, as a means for evaluating typefaces, is how poorly they portray what text actually looks like. Every language has a natural distribution of letters, from most to least common, English famously beginning with the E that accounts for one eighth of what we read, and ending with the Z that appears just once every 1,111 letters.²2 Letter frequencies have been calculated since at least the ninth century, and crop up in the most unexpected places: Etaoin Shrdlu, the leftmost rows of the Linotype keyboard, merits an entry in the OED. These values were calculated by computer scientist Peter Norvig, whose 2012 analysis measured a massive corpus containing more than 3.5 trillion letters. Letter frequencies differ by language and by era — the J is ten times more popular in Dutch than English; biblical English unduly favors the H thanks to archaisms like thou and sayeth — but no language behaves the way pangrams do, with their forced distribution of exotics. Seven of the most visually awkward letters, the W, Y, V, K, X, J, and Z, are among the nine rarest in English, but pangrams force them into every sentence, guaranteeing that every paragraph will be riddled with holes. A typeface designer certainly can’t avoid accounting for these unruly characters, but there’s no reason that they should be disproportionately represented when evaluating how a typeface will perform.
Frequency distribution of letters: natural English versus pangrammatic text.
In 2015, I dumped the pangrams we’d accumulated and rewrote our proofs from scratch, trading their wacky and self-satisfied cleverness for lists of words that are actually illustrative. My initial goal was to show each letter between flat- and round-sided neighbors, to illustrate categorically how each letter was spaced. (While drawing, type designers use strings such as nnsnonosoo to evaluate how a lowercase s fits between flat letters and round ones, judged by evaluating the fragments nsn and oso. Elsewhere in this string are three ‘control’ textures: the all-flat nn, the all-round oo, and the mixed-shape nono, which offer a baseline against which to measure any turbulence caused by the s.) Anecdotally, I know that the words “ensnare” and “boson” illustrate these same relationships, so I set about finding words that were similarly useful for the rest of the alphabet, using a combination of algorithmic dictionary searches and personal preference.
I also thought it might be useful if our proofs demonstrated each letter at the start of a word, and at the end, and also — crucially — doubled: letters like s and g take on mysterious properties once they start to accumulate, making words like “missing” and “buggy” often illuminating. (Some German-speaking typographers call these ‘schnapps-words,’ an endearing tribute to boozy double-vision. Satisfyingly, schnapps is itself a schnapps-word.) Even better than the schnapps-word “buggy,” which positions the gg pair next to an awkward y, would be something with a neutral context: the word “smuggle” does the job, with its flat-sided u and l.
But most importantly, I wanted to organize the text logically, so that instead of spending a whole afternoon stalking a wild K in the bush, I’d always know exactly where to find it. I thought I might further ease the process by choosing words that were familiar, comfortable to read, easy to remember, and easy to hear over the phone, to provide a little succor before the project of kerning individual pairs of letters would begin, and we’d find ourselves exiled to a bloodcurdling realm of Grijpskerks and Quijquemeyas.
Finally, I wanted the text to have the visual cadences of my native English, in which words of variable but digestible length are punctuated by shorter ones. Type, after all, should be something that you want to read.
Here’s the result:
H&Co Lowercase 1.0
Angel Adept Blind Bodice Clique Coast Dunce Docile Enact Eosin Furlong Focal Gnome Gondola Human Hoist Inlet Iodine Justin Jocose Knoll Koala Linden Loads Milliner Modal Number Nodule Onset Oddball Pneumo Poncho Quanta Qophs Rhone Roman Snout Sodium Tundra Tocsin Uncle Udder Vulcan Vocal Whale Woman Xmas Xenon Yunnan Young Zloty Zodiac. Angel angel adept for the nuance loads of the arena cocoa and quaalude. Blind blind bodice for the submit oboe of the club snob and abbot. Clique clique coast for the pouch loco of the franc assoc and accede. Dunce dunce docile for the loudness mastodon of the loud statehood and huddle. Enact enact eosin for the quench coed of the pique canoe and bleep. Furlong furlong focal for the genuflect profound of the motif aloof and offers. Gnome gnome gondola for the impugn logos of the unplug analog and smuggle. Human human hoist for the buddhist alcohol of the riyadh caliph and bathhouse. Inlet inlet iodine for the quince champion of the ennui scampi and shiite. Justin justin jocose for the djibouti sojourn of the oranj raj and hajjis. Knoll knoll koala for the banknote lookout of the dybbuk outlook and trekked. Linden linden loads for the ulna monolog of the consul menthol and shallot. Milliner milliner modal for the alumna solomon of the album custom and summon. Number number nodule for the unmade economic of the shotgun bison and tunnel. Onset onset oddball for the abandon podium of the antiquo tempo and moonlit. Pneumo pneumo poncho for the dauphin opossum of the holdup bishop and supplies. Quanta quanta qophs for the inquest sheqel of the cinq coq and suqqu. Rhone rhone roman for the burnt porous of the lemur clamor and carrot. Snout snout sodium for the ensnare bosom of the genus pathos and missing. Tundra tundra tocsin for the nutmeg isotope of the peasant ingot and ottoman. Uncle uncle udder for the dunes cloud of the hindu thou and continuum. Vulcan vulcan vocal for the alluvial ovoid of the yugoslav chekhov and revved. Whale whale woman for the meanwhile blowout of the forepaw meadow and glowworm. Xmas xmas xenon for the bauxite doxology of the tableaux equinox and exxon. Yunnan yunnan young for the dynamo coyote of the obloquy employ and sayyid. Zloty zloty zodiac for the gizmo ozone of the franz laissez and buzzing.
The new proof begins with each of the capital letters bounded by flat-sided and round-sided neighbors: the capital A up against the flat side of the n, and then the round side of the d, in the pair “Angel Adept.” This pattern continues through the Z, with “Zloty Zodiac.”