A panalphabetic window is a stretch of text that contains all the letters of the alphabet in order. It is a special type of

pangram A pangram or holoalphabetic sentence is a sentence using every letter of a given alphabet at least once. Pangrams have been used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and typing. Origins The best-k ...

or pangrammatic window. Natural-sounding panalphabetic sentences are not particularly difficult to construct. Poet

Howard Bergerson Howard William Bergerson (July 29, 1922 – February 19, 2011) was an American writer and poet, noted for his mastery of palindromes and other forms of wordplay. Work Bergerson's first volume of poetry, ''The Spirit of Adolescence'', was publi ...

constructed the following 132-letter panalphabetic window: Considerably rarer are short, naturally occurring panalphabetic windows. Based on the

letter frequency Letter frequency is the number of times letters of the alphabet appear on average in written language. Letter frequency analysis dates back to the Arab mathematician Al-Kindi (c. AD 801–873), who formally developed the method to break ciph ...

distribution of a large corpus, Mike Keith calculated the expected window size for English text to be around 3000 letters. His computer-assisted search of

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital li ...

identified the shortest natural panalphabetic window as a 535-letter passage from ''The Alkahest'', a translation of

Honoré de Balzac Honoré de Balzac ( , more commonly ; ; born Honoré Balzac; 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence ''La Comédie humaine'', which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is ...

's '' La Recherche de l'Absolu'':

References

{{reflist, refs= {{cite journal , last=Bergerson , first=Howard , date=August 1980 , title=Kickshaws , url=http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol13/iss3/12/ , journal= Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics , volume=13 , issue=3 , pages=175–186 {{cite book , last=Eckler , first=Ross , date=1997 , title=Making the Alphabet Dance: Recreational Wordplay , publisher=St Martins Griffin , page=160 , isbn=978-0312155803 {{cite journal , last=Eckler , first=A. Ross Jr., date=May 2010 , title=Howard Bergerson , url=http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol43/iss2/2/ , journal= Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics , volume=43 , issue=2 , pages=82–88 {{cite journal , last=Keith , first=Mike , date=February 2001 , title=Panalphabetic Windows in Literature , url=http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol34/iss1/23/ , journal= Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics , volume=34 , issue=1 , pages=74–76 Pangrams

See also

References