Engineer and language enthusiast Anu Garg runs a popular website, Wordsmith.org, which includes the A.Word.A.Day email, along with an anagram server, and other offerings for fellow word lovers. To celebrate the site’s 25th anniversary, Garg held a pangram contest. Pangrams are sentences that contain every letter of the alphabet at least once. The classic example is The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy sleeping dog. Martha and her fellow judges chose this one as the winner: Emoji having been popularized, texts acquire wacky faces, although she lobbied for Watson excels at Jeopardy!, quickly outbuzzing human favorites. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Pangram Contest”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
In 1994, a software engineer named Anu Garg started wordsmith.org,
The popular website for language lovers.
And this includes his immensely popular A Word A Day email,
His anagram server, where you can go to test anagrams.
And to celebrate the 25th anniversary of wordsmith.org,
He conducted some worldwide contests with limericks and anagrams
And pangrams. Now you know what a pangram is. Yeah, pangrams. These are sentences that contain
Every letter of the alphabet, and they have to be grammatical.
Right, right. So for example, the famous one is, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
But he asked people to write an original pangram that describes an event that happened in the last
25 years. So something from science, or the arts, or business, or politics. And I happen to be one
Of the judges for that contest, and I am here to tell you the winner of the Pangram contest.
Emoji having been popularized, texts acquire wacky faces.
Wow, that’s pretty good. And short, too.
It’s short. It’s just 48 letters, and it makes sense, too.
Yeah, it does make sense. It’s hard to say, though.
Yeah, it’s tricky to say. I was lobbying for a different one, which was
Watson excels at Jeopardy, quickly out-buzzing human favorites.
Oh, that’s really good, too.
Yeah, but I’m going to share some more of those later in the show.
Outstanding.
And you know, if you’re a pangram coiner, if you’re the kind of person who loves to mess around with words like this,
We want your pangrams, 877-929-9673.
Email words@waywordradio.org, or let’s start a conversation about pangrams on Twitter @wayword.
