Palindrome and pangram checker.

What the checker tests

Palindrome: a palindrome is a word, number, phrase or other sequence of symbols that reads the same backwards as forwards, such as "madam", "racecar" or "A man, a plan, a canal - Panama". The checker keeps only letters A to Z and digits, lowercases them, folds accents to the base letter, and compares the result with its reverse. If it fails, it shows the position of the first mismatch and the longest palindromic run inside the text.

Pangram: a pangram uses every letter of the alphabet at least once; a perfect pangram uses each letter exactly once, so it is an anagram of the alphabet. The checker counts the 26 letters A to Z and lists the missing ones. Digits and other alphabets are ignored for the pangram test.

Worked example

"A man, a plan, a canal - Panama" becomes "amanaplanacanalpanama" (21 characters), which equals its reverse, so it is a palindrome. "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" has 35 letters covering 26 of 26 letters, so it is a pangram but not a perfect one (a perfect pangram would have exactly 26 letters).

Limits

Only the English alphabet is tested. A pangram for another alphabet (such as one with accented letters counted as separate letters) will be reported as missing letters. Wikipedia notes that the only known perfect pangrams of the English alphabet use abbreviations or other non-dictionary words.

Sources (each opened October 8, 2026): Wikipedia, Palindrome; Wikipedia, Pangram.

Palindromes: the cleaning step matters most

A word or number is a palindrome if it reads the same in both directions. For phrases, the convention is to ignore capitalisation, spaces and punctuation, and that is what makes sentences like "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" count. Most mistakes come from doing that cleaning inconsistently, which is why the checker shows you the cleaned text it actually compared.

Worked example: a phrase that passes

"Was it a car or a cat I saw?" cleans to wasitacaroracatisaw, which is 19 characters. Compare the first character with the last, the second with the second to last, and so on: w matches w, a matches a, s matches s. The tenth character, o, is the middle of an odd-length string and has no partner. Every pair matches, so it is a palindrome. "Madam, I'm Adam" cleans to madamimadam and "No lemon, no melon" to nolemonnomelon; both pass.

Worked example: a word that fails

"Hello" cleans to hello, whose reverse is olleh. The very first pair, h against o, already differs, so the checker reports a mismatch at the first position. A near miss is more instructive: "racecars" reverses to sracecar, so it fails at the first pair, yet it contains the palindromic run racecar, which is the longest palindrome inside it and the one the checker reports.

Numbers and odd lengths

Digits are kept, so 12321 is a palindrome, as is 91019. Strings of odd length have a middle character that is its own partner, so it never causes a mismatch.

Pangrams: coverage, not length

A pangram uses every letter of an alphabet at least once. Pangrams are used to show off typefaces, to test keyboards, typewriters and teleprinters, and to practise handwriting and typing. The best-known English example, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", has been used since at least the late nineteenth century.

Worked example: counting coverage

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" has 35 letters and 26 distinct ones, so it is a pangram but not a perfect one, because a perfect pangram has exactly 26 letters. "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs." has 32 letters covering all 26. "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow" has 29. A perfect pangram is an anagram of the alphabet, and in English they are rare and rely on abbreviations or obscure words: "Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx." has exactly 26 letters, each used once.

Worked example: finding missing letters

Remove two words from the classic sentence to get "The quick brown fox jumps over the dog". It has 31 letters but only 22 distinct ones. The coverage table lists the four missing letters: a, l, y and z. That is the most practical use of the checker: if you are writing a pangram for a font sample or a typing test, it tells you which letters to work in.

Palindromes in other fields

The word is used differently in genetics, where a DNA sequence is palindromic when it equals its own reverse complement, as with ACCTAGGT. That is not the same as a text palindrome, and this checker does not test it. If you need that, use the DNA reverse complement tool.

What the checker ignores and what it does not

• Ignored: spaces, punctuation, capitalisation, and the accents on letters, which are folded to the base letter.
• Kept: letters A to Z and digits 0 to 9.
• Not handled: other alphabets. A Greek, Cyrillic or Japanese phrase is not evaluated, and a pangram for another language, for instance one that must include accented letters or the German ß, will be reported as missing letters.

Note one consequence of folding: "Niño" is treated as the letters of "Nino" when the accent is folded away. That is the right convention for English, and different from how a Spanish speaker would write it.

Who it is for

Students and teachers working through word-play exercises, puzzle writers and constructors checking an entry, programmers verifying the output of their own palindrome function against a trusted second implementation, and typographers building specimen lines. It does not suggest palindromes or generate pangrams. To count letters and words in a candidate sentence, use the word count checker, and for vowel and consonant statistics use the vowel and consonant counter.