We need new sentences that use every letter of the alphabet

August 9, 2013 | |Source Code

I've been spending a lot of time with Google Webfonts recently, looking for a semi-coherent font ensemble for this site. By default, every font is displayed in the sentence "Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the evil Queen and Jack."

This is a marked improvement over "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," but it still gets tiresome. Here's a simple app to count the frequency of characters in a sentence. If you find a good one, tweet it.

The algorithm for validating words (on the client!) comes from John Resig, who has a wonderful tutorial on trie structures and their use in Javascript word games. This app allows you to tweet your sentences if every letter is used and ever word appears in the 2of12inf.txt list on Kevin's Word List page. There are still a few bugs in the input, which looks up your entry in real time.

At some future date, I'd like to add word suggestions once the list of remaining letters gets down to 10 letters or so. This is basically a task for anagram algorithms with some forgiveness for reusing vowels.