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Word Ways

Authors

Mike Keith

Abstract

Most readers of Word Ways are familiar with the "accidental pangram" problem, which is to find a short 'window' (block of contiguous text) in published text that, but accident rather than deliberation, contains each letter of the alphabet at least once. The record for the shortest known accidental pangram in English has stood for 95 years, as it was reported in print by A. Cyril Pearson in The Twentieth Century Standard Puzzle Book, published in 1907. It is from The Beth Book, a popular 1897 novel by Sarah Grand (republished as recently as 1980 by The Dial Press).

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