What Is A Pangram?
A tangram is something lots of kids do at school whereby you start with various shapes of paper and must build things from them, working out how the pieces are put together in order to make each particular shape.
Whereas a tangram is to do with shapes, a pangram is to do with words, pure and simple. A pangram often refers to a sentence with a peculiar and interesting property: that is, it contains each and every letter of the alphabet exactly once. Many of us learn pangrams at school or at least the most famous one, but without knowing what it is actually called.
If you hear the sentence: A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, then you probably know that this sentence contains every letter from A-Z at least once, but you might not know that it is called a pangram.
Now that you know what a pangram is, then it is not hard to work out what a pangram crossword is: it is a puzzle that contains every letter from A-Z exactly once, and this of course is a property that it shares with a codeword. Every codeword is a pangram, whilst my no means every crossword is, apart from every pangram.
In fact, pangrams are surprisingly uncommon in English crosswords, due to the fact that letter frequencies mean that it is very rare for all the uncommon letters to occur naturally in one grid: many times you could solve a quick crossword in a publication for a whole year without finding a pangram.
Occasionally they appear in cryptic crosswords, where the setter deliberately creates a pangram. If solvers spot what they think is a pangram, then it can help them solve it, as it puts them on the lookout for unusual letters in words, which could make the puzzle slightly easier to solve: if they don't spot it, and many even think to look for it, then they are at no major disadvantage and can still solve the puzzle quite happily.
Date written: 06 Apr 2015
Comment on this post
You must be logged in to comment - please Register or Login
Novelty Crosswords: Anagram Puzzles
An anagram crossword is a novelty type of crossword puzzle, in that it is a crossword variant that is both rare and is fundamentally different to a normal crossword puzzle.
As you may have guessed, in an anagram crossword the clues are replaced with...
Added: 28 Mar 2015
Cryptic Crosswords: Hidden Word Clues
One type of cryptic crossword clue is called the 'hidden word' clue. As the name suggests, the answer here is actually hidden in the clue.
This sounds like it would be far too easy, but actually these answers can be very hard to spot - even when you...
Added: 17 Apr 2015
Does Brain Training Work?
Does brain training work? This is a big question, and there have been several tests and surveys carried out - some more scientific than others - to try and establish the truth.
Anecdotally at least, several people say that they have experienced...
Added: 23 Apr 2015
100 Hat Riddle Interview Question Solution
A riddle or lateral thinking puzzle that has existed in a variety of guises for a long period of time has recently been featured in the news, both because it is initially baffling but also because there have been reports of some companies using this...
Added: 25 Feb 2016
The Differences Between US And UK Crossword Grids
British and US crossword grids are very different. This is not something you might expect to be the case, but any puzzle lover who visits the other country soon realises that they are very different beasts.
It starts very much with the grid. With US...
Added: 27 Apr 2015
Back to Puzzle Blog
Puzzle Types:
