Amaranath sasesusos
Today I learned that people whose job was to align the type bars in typewriters (during manufacture) used this quasi-sentence to test the alignment:
Amaranath sasesusos Oronoco initiation secedes Uruguay Philadelphia
An explanation, from Darren Wershler-Henry’s 2005 book The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting:
“Amaranath,” the misspelled name of an imaginary flower, checks the alignment of the vowel “a” between a number of common consonants. “Oronoco” checks the “o” key, while “secedes,” “initiation” and “Uruguay” check three vowels that are among the most commonly used of all letters, “e,” “i,” and “u.” “Sasesusos” not only compares four of the five vowels in the same word against the baseline of the letter “s,” but also “includes several of the most common letter combinations in twentieth-century business English.” “Philadelphia” checks the horizontal alignment of “i” and “l,” the narrowest letters on the keyboard.