Lipogram
A lipogram is a piece of writing that deliberately avoids one or more letters of the alphabet, most famously the letter E.
Try writing a paragraph without the letter E, the most common letter in English. You lose "the", "he", "she", "be" and "were". Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a whole novel that way, Gadsby, in 1939.
How it works
The writer picks a letter to ban and sticks to it. The easiest ones are Z, J and Q, which are rare. The hardest is E. The restriction also forces a different vocabulary, and the text tends to read oddly formal.
- Gadsby (1939): about 50,000 words, no E.
- A Void (La Disparition, 1969, by Georges Perec): a French novel with no E, translated into English, also without E, by Gilbert Adair.
- Short lipograms: a tweet, a poem or a paragraph without a chosen letter.
Ancient Greek poets are said to have written poems without certain letters, so the game is old.
Why writers try it
The constraint pushes you out of habit. When your first word is not allowed, you search for a second, and sometimes the second is better. This is the same logic as writing a haiku or a sonnet: the limit is a way to find ideas.
Why it matters to a writer or editor
A lipogram is a good exercise for any writer stuck in a rut of familiar phrasing. Try a page without the verb "to be", or without adverbs ending in -ly. For an editor, it is a reminder that style has patterns, and that deliberately breaking a pattern shows how much the writer relied on it. The mirror image is the pangram, which uses every letter, and the palindrome is another constraint-based form.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most famous lipogram?
Gadsby, a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright of about 50,000 words that never uses the letter E. Georges Perec's French novel La Disparition (A Void, in English translation) does the same.
Why would anyone write a lipogram?
As a test of skill, and because the constraint forces fresh word choices. Writers find that a rule they cannot break pushes them to ideas they would not otherwise reach.
What is a tautogram?
The opposite game, in which every word begins with the same letter.