Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Is there a pangramic palindrome?

Pangrams are sentences that contain every letter of the alphabet. The classic is
The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
(NOTE- I had jumped but a reader corrected it to jumps) There are more here.

Palindromes are words, phrases, sentences, or even longer that are the same backwards as forward. See here for history and some examples. Weird Al has an entire song that is just palindromes which is titled bob. (Its the 14th best Bob Dylan satire of all time: See here which has a pointer to a ranked list.)

BUT here is my question: are there any sentences that are BOTH Pangrams AND Palindromes? I really want to ask are there any in English that are not too contrived. However, seaching the web I couldn't find any at all!! So I'll be happy to find any in any language.


  1. Peter Norvig's 17,826 word palindrome is pangrammatic. (Norvig found it by computer search; see here for details.)

  2. "jumps", not "jumped", otherwise you miss an 's'.

  3. Most sufficiently long palindromes (and there are many, see the first ) will contain all letters, one would expect. A more interesting question would be whether there are any short "pangramic palindrome". Clearly it must have at least 51 letters, but how short can it be made?

  4. so that is how you are trying to solve

    an old challenge question posed by ITA ? come on ...

  5. Anyone know of a pangram that contains each letter exactly once?

  6. Short pangrammata are discussed in the rec.puzzles FAQ.

  7. I just googled for the OuLiPo website (the OuLiPo being the French society interested in constrained writing), but stumbled upon that first :

  8. I strongly agree that

    A ... Z ... A

    (or any equivalent, like Z...A...Z) is the shortest pangramic palindrome, unless there is an agreement on the dictionary of allowed words (as the ITA formulation provides, indeed).

  9. Anon 4- THANKS!- When I first thought of this problem I also thought ``Gee, I am sure someone else has asked this but I can't find anyone.'' So THANKS for supplying
    the pointer to someone else.

    I didn't find it since I didn't think to Google

    Palindromic Pangram

    which would have worked.