The far more pernicious issue with pangrams, as a means for evaluating typefaces, is how poorly they portray what text actually looks like. Every language has a natural distribution of letters, from most to least common, English famously beginning with the E that accounts for 12% of what we read, and ending with the Z that appears just once every 1111 letters. Letter frequencies have been calculated since at least the 9th century, and crop up in the most unexpected places: Etaoin Shrdlu, the leftmost rows of the Linotype keyboard, merits an entry in the OED. These values were calculated by computer scientist Peter Norvig, whose 2012 analysis measured a massive corpus containing more than 3.5 trillion letters. Letter frequencies differ by language and by era — the J is 10x more popular in Dutch than English; biblical English unduly favors the H thanks to archaisms like thou and sayeth — but no language behaves the way pangrams do, with their forced distribution of exotics. 7 of the most visually awkward letters, the W, Y, V, K, X, J, and Z, are among the 9 rarest in English, but pangrams force them into every sentence, guaranteeing that every paragraph will be riddled with holes. A typeface designer certainly can’t avoid accounting for these unruly characters, but there’s no reason that they should be disproportionately represented when evaluating how a typeface will perform

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