{"id":18804,"date":"2026-07-11T08:29:38","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T15:29:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18804"},"modified":"2026-06-19T08:58:35","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T15:58:35","slug":"phonetic-pangrams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2026\/07\/11\/phonetic-pangrams\/","title":{"rendered":"Phonetic pangrams"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Way back in 1999, I wrote a column about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/1999\/01\/03\/aaalphabets2\/\">pangrams<\/a>: \u201cA pangram is a sentence that uses each letter of an alphabet at least once.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>Much more recently, I learned about the concept of a phonetic pangram: a sentence that uses each <em>phoneme<\/em> of a language at least once.<\/p>\r\n<p>That phrasing of mine elides a lot of complexity that makes the definition hard to pin down exactly. For example, different speakers of a given language may use somewhat different sets of phonemes, due to accents and dialects and such. And further complications arise when you consider <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Allophone\">allophones<\/a>\u2014sounds that a speaker of a language considers to be the same, but that are different if you compare <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Spectrogram\">spectrograms<\/a>. If you want to record a bunch of speech sounds in order to be able to generate speech, you need much more data than a single brief phonetic pangram.<\/p>\r\n<p>But even so, I like the general idea.<\/p>\r\n<p>One example of a phonetic pangram in English: \u201cThat quick beige fox jumped in the air over each thin dog. Look out, I shout, for he's foiled you again, creating chaos.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>For some more examples and further discussion, see a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quora.com\/Is-there-a-text-that-covers-the-entire-English-phonetic-range\">Quora question from 2015 or so<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[138,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pangrams","category-sound"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18804"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18807,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18804\/revisions\/18807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}