English words without vowels

This article contains content from Wikipedia An article on this subject has been nominated for deletion on Wikipedia: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ English words without vowels Current versions of the GNU FDL article on WP may contain information useful to the improvement of this article

WP+ NO DEL

In most languages of the world, all or nearly all words have Wikipedia:vowel sounds. In conservative rhotic dialects of English such as Wikipedia:Scottish English, and non-rhotic English dialects such as Wikipedia:Received Pronunciation, every Wikipedia:lexical word must contain at least one spoken vowel in its pronunciation. In some rhotic dialects, such as Wikipedia:General American, a word may contain no other vowel sounds if it instead has a syllabic R sound, as in word.

However, there are many words that do not contain a vowel letter (defined as Wikipedia:A, Wikipedia:E, Wikipedia:I, Wikipedia:O, Wikipedia:U) in their written form. In most of these, such as try, the letter Wikipedia:Y stands for a vowel sound. (Abbreviations such as km are not considered words in their own right.)

There are also some truly vowelless Wikipedia:interjections and Wikipedia:onomatopoeia which do not contain Y or R.

Words without vowel letters

In English, the letter Wikipedia:Y can be represent either a vowel or consonant sound, and a large number of Modern English words spell the ɪ and aɪsounds with the letter Y, such as try, cry, fly, fry, sky, why, tryst, Wikipedia:gym, Wikipedia:hymn, Wikipedia:lynx, lynch, Wikipedia:myth, wyrm, Wikipedia:myrrh, Wikipedia:pygmy, gypsy, flyby, Wikipedia:rhythm, and syzygy which are vowels in this case. The longest dictionary words (base forms excluding plurals) are rhythm, spryly, sylphy and syzygy. The longest such word in common use is Wikipedia:rhythms, and the longest such word in Modern English is the obsolete 17th-century word symphysy. If archaic words and spellings are considered, there are many more, the longest perhaps being twyndyllyngs, the plural of twyndyllyng meaning "twin".

Similarly, the letter Wikipedia:W stands for a vowel sound (/u/) in Welsh words, and a small number of these words have entered Modern English, such as:

• The Wikipedia:crwth (pronounced /ˈkrʊθ/ or /ˈkruːθ/ and also spelled cruth) is a Welsh musical instrument similar to the Wikipedia:violin:

He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn.

• cwtch (a hiding place or cubby hole) is also from Welsh, and crwth and cwtch are according to Collins the longest English dictionary words without A, E, I, O, U, or Y.
• A cwm (pronounced /ˈkuːm/) is a deep hollow within a mountain, usually with steep edges, such as the Wikipedia:Western Cwm of Wikipedia:Mount Everest. However, it is, in literary English, nearly always spelled combe (as in Wikipedia:Ilfracombe and Wikipedia:Castle Combe), coomb (as in Wikipedia:J. R. R. Tolkien) or comb (as in Alfred, Lord Tennyson).

English formerly used W as a vowel (especially in 14-15th century), generally corresponding to /u:/, and you can find W but no other vowel used to spell words such as wss (use) and swrd (sword).

The internet term Wikipedia:pwn arose as a misspelling of the word "own", due to the O and P keys being next to each other on the keyboard, and is now a commonly used word on the internet.

Words without Y or W

There are fewer words with no vowel letters including Y or W. The longest such lexical word (not counting interjections) is tsktsks, pronounced /ˌtɪskˈtɪsks/. The mathematical expression nth /ˈɛnθ/, as in delighted to the nth degree, is in fairly common usage.

Vowelless proper names, such as Wikipedia:Ng, have entered from other languages. (See below.)

There are also numerous vowelless interjections, including m-hm, hmm, mm, brr, grr, zzzz, shhhh. Many can be lengthened indefinitely. However there is debate as to whether they are true words and only psst (pronounced /pst/, "Used to attract attention or give warning, esp. surreptitiously") appears in the Wikipedia:Oxford English Dictionary.

Usage in Literature

The poem "And Sometimes" by Wikipedia:Christian Bök contains no vowel letters.

Words without vowel sounds

Some linguists claim that English cannot have words without vowel sounds.

Rhotic dialects, such as in Canada and the United States, have many words such as bird, learn, girl, church, worst, which some phoneticians analyze as having no vowels, only a syllabic consonant, [ɹ̩]. However, others analyze these words instead as having a Wikipedia:rhotic vowel, [ɝ]. The difference may be partially one of dialect. John Walker suggested birchen which arguably in some accents features syllabic R and syllabic N.

There are a few such words which are disyllabic, like cursor, Wikipedia:curtain, and Wikipedia:turtle: [ˈkɹ̩sɹ̩], [ˈkɹ̩tn̩] and [ˈtɹ̩tl̩] (or [ˈkɝːsɚ], [ˈkɝːtən], and [ˈtɝːtəl]), and even a few which are trisyllabic, such as purpler [ˈpɹ̩.pl̩.ɹ̩], hurdler [ˈhɹ̩.dl̩.ɹ̩], burglar [ˈbɹ̩.ɡl̩.ɹ̩], gurgler [ˈɡɹ̩.ɡl̩.ɹ̩], certainer [ˈsɹ̩.tn̩.ɹ̩], and Wikipedia:Ur-turtle [ˈɹ̩.tɹ̩.tl̩]. The words wyrm and Wikipedia:myrrh contain neither a vowel letter nor a vowel sound in these dialects: [ˈwɹ̩m], [ˈmɹ̩] (or [ˈwɝːm], [ˈmɝː]).

The word and frequently contracts to a simple Wikipedia:nasal stop ’n, as in lock 'n key [ˌlɒk ŋ ˈkiː]. Words such as will, have, and is regularly contract to ’ll [l], ’ve [v], and ’s [z]. However, none of them are pronounced alone without vowels. Onomatopoeic words that can be pronounced alone, and which have no vowels or ars, include hmm, pst!, shh!, tsk!, and zzz.

Other languages

There are other languages that form lexical words without any vowel sounds. Many Slavonic languages feature vocalic /r/ between consonants, in which context it functions like a vowel. In Wikipedia:Serbo-Croatian, for example, the consonants [r] and [rː] (the difference is not written) can act as a Wikipedia:syllable nucleus and carry rising or falling tone; examples include the tongue-twister na vrh brda vrba mrda and geographic names such as Wikipedia:Krk. In Czech, and Slovak, either [l] or [r] can stand in for vowels: vlk [vl̩k] "wolf", krk [kr̩k] "neck". A particularly long word without vowels is čtvrthrst, meaning "quarter-handful", with two syllables (one for each R). Whole sentences can be made from such words, such as Wikipedia:Strč prst skrz krk, meaning "stick a finger through your neck" (follow the link for a sound file), and Smrž pln skvrn zvlhl z mlh "A morel full of spots wetted from fogs". (Here zvlhl has two syllables based on L; note that the Wikipedia:preposition z consists of a single consonant. Only prepositions do this in Czech, and they normally link phonetically to the following noun, so do not really behave as vowelless words.) In Russian, there are also prepositions that consist of a single consonant letter, like k "to", v "in", and s "with". However, these forms are actually contractions of ko, vo, and so respectively, and these forms are still used in modern Russian before words with certain consonant clusters for ease of pronunciation.

In Kazakh and certain other Wikipedia:Turkic languages, words without vowel sounds may occur due to reduction of weak vowels. A common example is the Kazakh word for one: bir, pronounced [bɾ]. Among careful speakers, however, the original vowel may be preserved, and the vowels are always preserved in the orthography.

In southern Chinese varieties, such as Cantonese or Wikipedia:Minnan, some monosyllabic words are made of exclusively nasals, such as [m̩˨˩] "not" and [ŋ̩˩˧] "five".

So far, all of these syllabic consonants, at least in the Wikipedia:lexical words, have been Wikipedia:sonorants, such as [r], [l], [m], and [n], which have a voicing quality similar to vowels. However, there are languages with words that not only contain no vowels, but contain no sonorants at all, like shh! in English. These include some Wikipedia:Berber languages, some of the northwestern Wikipedia:Bantu languages, and some languages of the American Wikipedia:Pacific Northwest, such as Nuxálk. An example from the latter is sxs "seal fat" (pronounced |sxs|, as spelled), and a longer one is {{unicode|xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ (pronounced xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ|) "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant". (Follow the Nuxálk link for other examples.) Berber examples include /tkkststt/ "you took it off" and /tfktstt/ "you gave it". Some words may contain one or two consonants only: /ɡ/ "be", /ks/ "feed on". In Wikipedia:Mandarin Chinese, words and syllables such as sī and zhī are sometimes described as being syllabic fricatives and affricates phonemically, /ś/ and /tʂ́/, but these do have a voiced segment that carries the tone. In the Wikipedia:Japonic language Miyako, there are words with no voiced sounds, such as ss 'dust', kss 'breast/milk', pss 'day', ff 'a comb', kff 'to make', fks 'to build', ksks 'month', sks 'to cut', psks 'to pull'.

See also

• Wikipedia:Words without consonants
• Wikipedia:List of words that comprise a single sound
• Wikipedia:List of words in English without A, E, I, O or U

References

Wikipedia:Category:Types of words Wikipedia:Category:Vowels Wikipedia:Category:Vowel letters Wikipedia:Category:Lists of English words