I would like to know a credible, reputable reference that shows whom
is the original inventor of the following sentance:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
(other variations exist)

Refrences to the book "Ella Minnow Pea" do not count as a credible
reference, since this book is fiction.

Ask yourself "If this was a college research paper worth 1/2 of my
semester grade, would this resource be considered legitimate enough to
be included in the bibliography" when answering this question. I am
not interested in pop trivia sites and people's personal homepages.

---

Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 09 Sep 2006 07:49 PDT

A brief newspaper article from 1885, and titled "A Favorite Copy"  says:

"A favorite copy set by writing teachers for their pupils is the
following because it contains every letter the alphabet "A quick brown
fox jumps over the lazy dog."

Whether it was borrowed by writing teachers from Western Union use, or
vice versa, is hard to say...I saw no primary references that verified
the Western Union story.

Would the cite for the 1885 article meet your needs?

pafalafa-ga

---

Clarification of Question by brandenads-ga on 09 Sep 2006 11:38 PDT

The cite of the newspaper article would be interesting, but as you
said, it does not mention who invented it. What can help you is, maybe
to do some digging into Western Union history, and see if there are
articles/books that describe the teletype days, and maybe there will
be something that references the inventor of the phrase.

I'm not certain how authoratative this is, so I'm posting it as a comment:

Most websites state: The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the
lazy dog." uses every letter in the alphabet. (Developed by Western
Union to Test telex/twx communications)

I also found this:

"Both Western Union and the Phone Company use teletypewriters
extensively. You know: a letter struck on a typewriter in a New York
office is electrically reproduced on a machine in some other city. The
Phone Company tests with "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy
dog's back" and Western Union sends "William Jax quickly taught five
dozen Republicans".
--- From the New Yorker
1 February 1936

http://www.ralphmag.org/jovial-squawZK.html

I hope this helps.

Rainbow~

I've never heard Western Union quoted as the source but it sounds very
credible to me.

Well done, Rainbow!

The phrase in question is quoted in this article on the "Dvorak keyboard":
http://www.voicenet.com/~grassie/Fldr.Articles/Simplified.html

The article, however, does not make it clear if the phrase was used
by Dvorak himself (i.e. promoting the new keyboard or in his book).

More on Dvorak:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Dvorak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriting_Behavior
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard

When I was an undergraduate, in the late 1960s, I wrote a term paper
on the subject of pangrams. I did quite a bit of research at that
time, and I never came across a verifiable attribution for the "quick
brown fox" pangram. I'd be very surprised if one can be found now.
Locating the name of the individual who originated so widely-used a
phrase is, in my opinion, highly unlikely.

The term paper mentioned by pinkfreud-ga is very interesting. I am
also interested in pangrams. Is it possible that I can see a copy of
the term paper you wrote, if you still have it?

Alas, I no longer have any of my college term papers. They were stored
in a family storage trunk that was overtaken by black mold, and
everything was literally turned to dust. I lost a lot of memories to
those blasted fungi.

An example of the phrase being used to display fonts."The quick brown
fox jumps over the lazy dog" is a pangram that has been used to test
typewriters and computer keyboards because it is coherent, short, and
contains all the letters of the English alphabet. It was often used
for testing the teletype services (a procedure known as "foxing") when
these machines were still used.[citation needed] In the age of
computers, it is often used as a sample text in font selection
contexts.

The phrase is frequently misquoted as "The quick brown fox jumped over
the lazy dog", which does not contain all the letters of the alphabet
since it lacks the letter "s". For this reason, the word "slow" or
"sleeping" is sometimes inserted into the phrase, or the word "dog" is
made plural.


An example of the phrase being used to display fonts."The quick brown
fox jumps over the lazy dog" is a pangram that has been used to test
typewriters and computer keyboards because it is coherent, short, and
contains all the letters of the English alphabet. It was often used
for testing the teletype services (a procedure known as "foxing") when
these machines were still used.[citation needed] In the age of
computers, it is often used as a sample text in font selection
contexts.

The phrase is frequently misquoted as "The quick brown fox jumped over
the lazy dog", which does not contain all the letters of the alphabet
since it lacks the letter "s". For this reason, the word "slow" or
"sleeping" is sometimes inserted into the phrase, or the word "dog" is
made plural.

Supriya53-ga, why not include the link to your quotation (i.e. to both
your quotations)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%3Drand()
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_quick_brown_fox_jumps_over_the_lazy_dog

Just for fun!  

There's a fictional book about the origin of the phrase: "A quick brown
fox jumps over the lazy dog" --sounds like a good read...

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters
http://www.geocities.com/athens/4824/rev-d2.htm (the review)
ORDER THE BOOK: http://www.amazon.com/Ella-Minnow-Pea-Novel-Letters/dp/0385722435
..."Mark Dunn's ELLA MINNOW PEA is subtitled "a progressively
lipogrammatic epistolary fable." It is set on the island nation of
Nollop, whose founder wrote the famous panagram "A quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog," which is inscribed on a plinth in the center
of the capital city. One day, the letter 'Z' falls off and the council
decides this is a sign that means that henceforth no one should use
that letter in either speech nor writing. A few weeks, later 'Q' also
falls, and so on. The book is a combination of lipogrammatic writing
(i.e., writing that avoids one or more letters), a cautionary tale
against losing one rights a bit at a time, and also a criticism of
theocracies which claim to know the will of God. However, the last two
are a bit obvious, and the first starts out clever, but becomes a bit
of a cheat. (At some point, the council decides that people can write
words that had the forbidden letters by spelling them
differently--e.g., when they can no longer use 'U', they can write
"yewniverse".) There's also a secret underground trying to construct a
sentence shorter than "A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" that
uses all the letters of the alphabet, because if they can, that will
prove that Nollop was not divine, and the falling of the tiles
shouldn't be taken as divine signs. I will leave the details of the
attempt for the reader to discover. (This is in a broad sense fantasy,
by the way, and I discovered it through a review in the NEW YORK
REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION.) ..."