All I want is...

[ewx]

...an English sentence that contains all of the 26 letters of the alphabet exactly once. Any suggestions? I'm sure there are some well-known ones that I just happen not to know...

Acceptable (but inferior) variants could include any of "-", "=", "[", "]", ";", "'", "#", ",", "." and "/" - each symbol appearing at most once. I'd rather not include these though as I can't sanely represent spaces and punctuation would thus look rather out of place.

Another acceptable but variant is to use digits as well, but again, each digit can appear at most once (and if it's going to include any digits I'd prefer it included all ten).

Comments

[ceb.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'm not convinced the vowel fraction is high enough for this to work...

C.

[meirion.livejournal.com]

http://rec-puzzles.org/new/sol.pl/language/english/sentences/pangram
is what you're after, i think.

-m-

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That's the idea ... I think ceb might be right about the shortage of vowels though l-/

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Zing! Vex't cwm fly jabs Kurd qoph

[with an onomatopeoic noise, an archaically-irritated insect from the Welsh valleys attacks a Hebrew glyph drawn by an inhabitant of Northern Iraq]

This was in the Guinness Book of Records in, umm, 1986 I think. It stuck in my mind, I use it to key single-substitution ciphers, which I presume is exactly what you're trying to do.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

No ciphers are involved - this is art, not cryptography l-)

The trouble with your suggestion (and also the examples on the pangram site) are that they would become even less readable without punctuation or word boundaries: "ZINGVEXTCWMFLYJABSKURDQOPH" depends on people being familiar enough with wods like "cwm" and "qoph" to even realize that they're looking at a sentence rather than a jumble of letters. Even "ZING!VEX'TCWMFLYJABSKURDQOPH" isn't much better.

(Yes, the capital letters are a requirement. I don't even get to choose the font though it's a reasonably sensible sans-serif one, in fact.)

[fanf]

There have been several different ones in the Guinness Book over the years, gradually increasing in comprehensibility. The most recent one I can remember is "Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx."

[ewx.livejournal.com]

...I've just thought of a really obvious way I can have spaces, which I should have considered ages ago. It'll look a bit uglier, but you'll actually be able to make out the words. Suddenly this all seems a bit more plausible.

[keirf.livejournal.com]

I say "qldgrjbzvpfkmunch" to ewx.

[mhk.livejournal.com]

You might find something in internet typing courses.