Odds & Ends

Did you know ...

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Again and again and again...

If you start spelling out numbers (one, two, three, ...), you wouldn't use the letter A until you reach thousand.

Rotokas, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, has the smallest alphabet: 12 letters (A, E, G, I, K, O, P, R, S, T, U, V).

As for the language with the longest alphabet, well, it depends on whom you ask, how you count, etc. According to Guinness World Records, the largest alphabet belongs to the Khmer language, spoken in Cambodia and other countries. It has 74 letters.

Back in 1983, Lee Sallows, an electronics engineer, created dedicated hardware to find pangrams.

In France, there's a veterinary medicine named Pangram. It appears to be a case of false advertising as the letters j, k, and w are missing from the ingredients list [Gentamicine (sous forme de sulfate), Parahydroxybenzoate de méthyle (E218), Parahydroxybenzoate de propyle, Bisulfite de sodium en solution, Edétate disodique, Eau].

If you start spelling out numbers (zero, one, two, three, ...), you would use the letter Z right at the beginning and wouldn't use
A until you reach thousand
B until you reach billion
C until you reach octillion (10²⁷)
D until you reach hundred
J ever
K ever
M until you reach million
P until you reach septillion (10²⁴)
Q until you reach quadrillion (10¹⁵).

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