A lipogram (from Greek lipagrammatos, "missing letter") is a kind of writing with constraints or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is missing, usually a common vowel, the most common in English being e (McArthur, 1992). A lipogram author avoiding e then only uses the 25 remaining letters of the alphabet. Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern. ... Word games can be of several different types: Letter arrangement games, where the goal is to form words out of given letters: Anagrams -- both a simple game of rearranging letters and a linguistic recreation of making anagrams that seem to illuminate something about the original word, such as dog for... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The letter E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. ...

An example of a lipogram omitting "e" is this version of the preceding paragraph:

A lipogram is a kind of writing with constraints consisting of writing full paragraphs or books in which a particular symbol, such as that fifth symbol in talks in which it is most common, is missing. An author must submit to an awful handicap, allowing only consonants and A, I, O, and U; this is ordinarily a quorum of six fours and half of two. Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern. ... The letter E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. ... The letter A is the first (1st) letter in the Latin alphabet. ... I is the 9th letter in the Latin alphabet. ... O is the fifteenth letter of the Latin alphabet. ... U is the twenty-first letter of the modern Latin alphabet. ...

Writing a lipogram is a trivial task for uncommon letters like Z, W, or X, but it is much more difficult for common letters like E. Writing this way is impractical, as the author must omit many ordinary words, resulting in stilted-sounding text that can be difficult to understand. Well-written lipograms are rare. Z is the twenty-sixth and last letter of the English alphabet. ... W is the twenty-third letter of the modern Latin alphabet. ... X is the twenty-fourth letter of the Latin alphabet. ... The letter E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. ...

Examples of lipograms include the above example, Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (1939), and Georges Perec's novel A Void (La Disparition) (1969), all of which are missing the letter E (the most common letter in both French and English). Perec was one of a group of French authors called Oulipo who adopted a variety of constraints in their work. Gilbert Adair's U.S. translation of La Disparition, titled A Void, stayed faithful to the spirit of the French original by not using the letter E either, thereby restricting the writer from employing such common English words as the and me. Ernest Vincent Wright (1873? - 1939?) was an American author. ... Gadsby is a notorious book by Ernest Vincent Wright, circa 1939. ... 1939 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... Georges Perec (March 7, 1936 - March 3, 1982) was a 20th century French novelist, filmmaker and essayist, a member of the Oulipo group and considered by many to be one of the most important post-WWII authors. ... La disparition (1969, literally, The Disappearance) is a lipogrammatic novel, over 300 pages long, by French writer Georges Perec that was written without a single e in following Oulipo constraints. ... The letter E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Oulipo stands for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, which translates roughly as workshop of potential literature. It is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians, and seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. ...

Another recent example is Eunoia by Christian Bök in which each chapter is missing four of the five vowels. For example the fourth chapter does not contain any of the letters A, E, I or U. A typical sentence from this chapter is "Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth." Lipogrammatic writing which uses only one vowel is called univocalic (McArthur, 1992). Eunoia is a rarely used medical term referring to a state of normal mental health. ... Christian Bök (born Book, 1966) is a Canadian concrete and experimental poet. ... A univocalic is a type of poem that uses only one vowel (i. ...

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn is described as a "progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable": the plot of the story deals with a small country which begins to outlaw the use of various letters, and as each letter is outlawed within the story, it is (basically) no longer used in the text of the novel. It is not purely lipogrammatic, however, because the outlawed letters do appear in the text proper from time to time (the characters being penalized with banishment for their use) and when the plot requires a search for pangram sentences, all twenty-six letters are obviously in use. Also, late in the text, the author begins using letters serving as homonyms for the omitted letters (i.e. "PH" in place of an "F", "G" in place of "C"), which some might argue is cheating. Ella Minnow Pea is a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable written by Mark Dunn. ... Mark Dunn is an American author and playwright. ... A pangram (Greek: pan gramma, every letter) or holoalphabetic sentence is a piece of text which uses every letter of the alphabet. ... Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words that have the same phonetic or orthographic form but unrelated meaning. ...

Another interesting lipogram is that Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven has every letter in it except for Z. Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809–October 7, 1849) was an American poet, short story writer, editor and critic. ... Gustave Doré illustrated The Raven. ...

References

• McArthur, Tom (1992). The Oxford Companion to the English Language, p.612. Oxford University Press. ISBN 019214183X.