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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the album, see Autogram (album).

An autogram (Ancient Greek: αὐτός = self, γράμμα = letter) is a sentence that describes itself in the sense of providing an
inventory of its own characters. They were invented by Lee Sallows, who also coined the word autogram.[1] An essential
feature is the use of full cardinal number names such as "one", "two", etc., in recording character counts. Autograms are also
called 'self-enumerating' or 'self-documenting' sentences. Often, letter counts only are recorded while punctuation signs are
ignored, as in this example:
This sentence employs two a's, two c's, two d's, twenty-eight e's, ve f's, three g's, eight h's, eleven i's, three l's, two m's,
thirteen n's, nine o's, two p's, ve r's, twenty- ve s's, twenty-three t's, six v's, ten w's, two x's, ve y's, and one z.
The rst autogram to be published was composed by Sallows in 1982 and appeared in Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical
Themas" column in Scienti c American.[2]
Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's,
sixteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty- ve n's, twenty-four o's, ve p's, sixteen r's, forty-
one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes,
seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !
The task of producing an autogram is perplexing because the object to be described cannot be known until its description is
rst complete.[3][4]
Self-enumerating pangrams
A type of autogram that has attracted special interest is the autogramic pangram, a self-enumerating sentence in which every
letter of the alphabet occurs at least once.[5] Certain letters do not appear in either of the two autograms above, which are
therefore not pangrams. The rst ever self-enumerating pangram appeared in a Dutch newspaper and was composed by
Rudy Kousbroek.[6][7][8] Sallows, who lives in the Netherlands, was challenged by Kousbroek to produce a self-enumerating
'translation' of this pangram into English—an impossible-seeming task. This prompted Sallows to construct an electronic
Pangram Machine.[1]Eventually the machine succeeded, producing the example below which was published in Scienti c
American in October 1984:[9]
This pangram contains four as, one b, two cs, one d, thirty es, six fs, ve gs, seven hs, eleven is, one j, one k, two ls, two ms,
eighteen ns, fteen os, two ps, one q, ve rs, twenty-seven ss, eighteen ts, two us, seven vs, eight ws, two xs, three ys, & one
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