The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog – Meaning, Origin and Usage

If you’ve been learning how to speak and write in the English language, there’s a good chance that you may have come across the sentence ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’

In this article, I’m going to let you know why this has become such an important sentence for learning English, and tell you where the sentence originated from many years ago. I will also provide some alternative sentences that you can use in place of it.

What is the meaning of the phrase ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’?

The sentence ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ isn’t actually an idiom or a metaphor, but is a pangram (more on this shortly).

The meaning of the sentence has no actual meaning beyond its literal one. But it’s one you’re likely to see a lot when learning to speak and write English. Which leads us nicely on to our next section…

What is the significance of the phrase ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’?

The sentence ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ is what is known as a pangram. A pangram is a sentence that uses every single letter in the English alphabet. All 26 of them. A pangram doesn’t have to have exactly 26 letters in it, so long as it has at all 26 letters of the alphabet.

For this reason, when young children are learning how to read and write in English, this is often a sentence that they will see and come across. It is a simple enough sentence for young children to see and understand, with no more than two syllables in each word. 

It’s a good sentence to use when teaching people to read and write English, as they learn to associate the different sounds of the letters of the alphabet with their respective shapes in both print and cursive writing styles.

Typically, a teacher would write the sentence ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ on a blackboard or whiteboard, and the pupils would be asked to copy the sentence down onto paper or onto notebooks.

Similarly, it’s also a helpful sentence to use in teaching people to type on a Qwerty keyboard to help them become familiar with where each letter is on the keyboard.

The sentence demonstrates what’s possible with wordplay in the English language and newcomers occasionally find it amusing.

That said, besides its use as a teaching tool, you’re unlikely to come across the phrase outside of an English teaching scenario.

What is the origin of the phrase ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’?

A similar version of the sentence ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ was first recorded in the June of 1885, in a newspaper called The Mainland Mercury, where it said ‘A quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.’ And, as you may imagine, it was used in the context of teaching English.

However, in its original form, it was not an official pangram because the use of an ‘A’ instead of a ‘The’ meant that not all 26 letters of the alphabet were presented in the sentence.

The  earliest recording of the pangram ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ came two years later in the newspaper The Queenslander.

What you can say in place of ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’.

Sometimes people use the phrase ‘The quick brown fox’ as a shorter way of saying the full pangram. But it’s rarely used in everyday conversation, unless people are learning English reading, writing or typing, or if talking about the teaching of English.

If you wanted to demonstrate the phenomenon of pangrams, there are also other pangrams you could use in its place, or in addition to ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’.

Here follows a few examples for you:

• Puzzled women bequeath jerks very exotic gifts.
• When zombies arrive, quickly fax Judge Pat.
• Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
• Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes.
• Go, lazy fat vixen; be shrewd, jump quick.
• The five boxing wizards jump quickly.
• A mad boxer shot a quick, gloved jab to the jaw of his dizzy opponent. 
• Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
• Six big devils from Japan quickly forgot how to waltz.

Final thoughts

So, to summarise, the sentence ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ is what is known as a pangram, because it uses all 26 letters of the alphabet. It’s not the only sentence of this sort, there are many others, but it is one of the more favoured pangrams for the teaching of reading, writing and typing in English.