heart-shaped shop sign stating "Anybody can cuddle but only the Welsh can cwtch"

English orthography typically represents vowel sounds with the five conventional vowel letters ⟨a, e, i, o, u⟩, as well as ⟨y⟩, which may also be a consonant depending on context. However, outside of abbreviations, there are a handful of words in English that do not have vowels, either because the vowel sounds are not written with vowel letters or because the words themselves are pronounced without vowel sounds.

Words without written vowels

There are very few lexical words (that is, not counting interjections) without vowel letters. The longest such lexical word is tsktsks,^[1] pronounced /ˌtɪskˈtɪsks/. The mathematical expression nth /ˈɛnθ/, as in delighted to the nth degree, is in fairly common usage.^[2] Another mathematical term without vowel letters is ln, the natural logarithm. A more obscure example is rng /ˈrʌŋ/, derived from ring by deleting the letter ⟨i⟩. Vowelless proper names from other languages, such as the surname Ng, may retain their original spelling, even if they are pronounced with vowels.

In the Middle English period, there were no standard spellings, but ⟨w⟩ was sometimes used to represent either a vowel or a consonant sound in the same way that Modern English does with ⟨y⟩, particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries. This vocalic ⟨w⟩ generally represented /uː/,^[3][4] as in wss ("use").^[5] However at that time the form ⟨w⟩ was still sometimes used to represent a digraph ⟨uu⟩ (see W), not as a separate letter. In modern Welsh, "W" is simply a single letter which often represents a vowel sound. Thus words borrowed from Welsh may use ⟨w⟩ this way, such as:

• The crwth^[6] (pronounced /ˈkrʊθ/ or /ˈkruːθ/, also spelled cruth in English) is a Welsh musical instrument similar to the violin.^[7]

He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn.^[8]

• cwtch (a hiding place or cubby hole) is also from Welsh (albeit a recent word influenced by English, and used almost exclusively in the variant of English spoken in Wales, not in standard English), and crwth and cwtch are the longest English dictionary words without ⟨a, e, i, o, u, y⟩ according to Collins Dictionary.^[9]
• A cwm^[10] (pronounced /ˈkuːm/) is used in English in a technical geographical or mountaineering context to mean a deep hollow in a mountainous area, usually with steep edges on some sides, like a corrie or cirque, such as the Western Cwm of Mount Everest. It is also sometimes used, by way of more recent borrowing from Welsh, in a more general sense of a valley. The spellings coombe, combe, coomb, and comb come from the Old English cumb,^[11] which appears either to be a much earlier borrowing from a predecessor of modern Welsh, or to have an even earlier origin, given that there was an ancient Greek word κὑμβη (kumbē) meaning a hollow vessel.^[12] In English literature, one can find the spellings combe (as in Ilfracombe and Castle Combe), coomb (as in J. R. R. Tolkien) or comb (as in Alfred, Lord Tennyson).

There are also numerous vowelless interjections and onomatopoeia found more or less frequently, including brr or brrr, bzzt, grrr, hm, hmm, mm, mmm, mhmm, sksksksk,^[13][14] pfft, pht, phpht,^[7] psst, sh, shh, zzz. It is questionable whether any of these are words: they are sequences of letters used to imitate a sound, and there is no limit to how many such sequences could be constructed.

Words without vowel sounds

Weak forms of function words may be realized without vowel sounds, as in I can go [aɪ kŋ̍ ˈɡoʊ] and I must sell [aɪ ms̩ ˈsɛl].^[15] Some of these forms are reflected in orthography as contractions, such as 's, 'll, 'd, and n't.

See also

• Wiktionary:List of words that comprise a single sound
• Disemvoweling – Removal of vowels from a text
• Words without vowels in other languages

References