What are “pangrams,” “lipograms,” and “palindromes”?
- These are all types of constrained writing—playing with language in creative ways:
-
-
Pangram: A sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet. (“The quick brown fox…”)
-
Lipogram: A text that avoids using one or more letters, often “E”.
-
Palindrome: A word or sentence that reads the same backward and forward. (“Madam,” “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama”)
-
📜 History: Lipograms go back to ancient Greece, with Tryphiodorus, who rewrote Homer’s Odyssey without using the letter sigma (Σ).
🤔 Trivia: A novel titled “Gadsby” (1939) is over 50,000 words long and never uses the letter “E”!
