Lipogram

Alipogram(fromAncient Greek:λειπογράμματος,leipográmmatos,"leaving out a letter") is a kind ofconstrained writingorword gameconsisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided.Extended Ancient Greek texts avoiding the lettersigmaare the earliest examples of lipograms.

Writing a lipogram may be a trivial task when avoiding uncommon letters likeZ,J,Q,orX,but it is much more challenging to avoidcommon letterslikeE,T,orAin the English language, as the author must omit many ordinary words. Grammatically meaningful and smooth-flowing lipograms can be difficult to compose. Identifying lipograms can also be problematic, as there is always the possibility that a given piece of writing in any language may be unintentionally lipogrammatic. For example,Poe's poemThe Ravencontains noZ,but there is no evidence that this was intentional.

Apangrammatic lipogramis a text that uses every letter of the Alpha bet except one. For example, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" omits the letterS,whichthe usual pangramincludes by using the wordjumps.

History

Lasus of Hermione,who lived during the second half of the sixth century BCE, is the most ancient author of a lipogram. This makes the lipogram, according toQuintus Curtius Rufus,"the most ancient systematic artifice of Western literature".Lasus did not like thesigma,and excluded it from one of his poems, entitledOde to the Centaurs,of which nothing remains; as well as aHymn to Demeter,of which the first verse remains:

Original Δάματρα μέλπω Κόραν τε Κλυμένοι᾽ ἄλοχον μελιβόαν ὕμνον ἀναγνέων Αἰολίδ᾽ ἂμ βαρύβρομον ἁρμονίαν

Transliteration Dámatra mélpô Kóran te Klyménoi᾽ álochon melibóan hýmnon anagnéôn Aiolíd᾽ ám barýbromon harmonían

English translation I chant of Demeter and Kore, Wife of the famed [Hades] Lifting forth a gentle-voiced hymn In the deep-toned Aeolian mode.

The Greek poets from late antiquityNestor of LarandaandTryphiodoruswrote lipogrammatic adaptations of the Homeric poems: Nestor composed anIliad,which was followed by Tryphiodorus'Odyssey.Both Nestor's Iliad and Tryphiodorus' Odyssey were composed of 24 books (like the original Iliad and Odyssey) each book omitting a subsequent letter of theGreek Alpha bet.Therefore, the first book omitted Alpha, the second beta, and so forth.

Twelve centuries after Tryphiodorus wrote his lipogrammaticOdyssey,in 1711, the influential London essayist and journalistJoseph Addisoncommented on this work (although it had been lost), arguing that "it must have been amusing to see the most elegant word of the language rejected like" a diamond with a flaw in it "if it was tainted by the proscribed letter".

Petrus Riga,a canon of Sainte-Marie de Reims during the 11th century, translated the Bible, and due to its scriptural obscurities called itAurora.Each canto of the translation was followed by a resume in Lipogrammatic verse; the first canto has noA,the second has noB,and so on. There are two hundred and fifty manuscripts of Petrus Riga's Bible still preserved.

There is a tradition of German and Italian lipograms excluding the letterRdating from the seventeenth century until modern times. While some authors excluded other letters, it was the exclusion of theRwhich ensured the practice of the lipogram continued into modern times. In German especially, theR,while not the most prevalent letter, has a very important grammatical role, as masculine pronouns, etc. in the nominative case include anR(e.g.er,der,dieser,jener,welcher).For the Italian authors, it seems to be a profound dislike of the letterRwhich prompted them to write lipograms excluding this letter (and often only this letter).

There is also a long tradition ofvocalic lipograms,in which a vowel (or vowels) is omitted. This tends to be the most difficult form of the lipogram. This practice was developed mainly in Spain by the Portuguese author Alonso de Alcala y Herrera who published an octavo entitledVarios efectos de amor, en cinco novelas exemplares, y nuevo artificio para escribir prosa y versos sin una de las letras vocales.From Spain, the method moved into Franceand England.

One of the most remarkable examples of a lipogram isErnest Vincent Wright's novelGadsby(1939), which has over 50,000 words but not a single letterE.Wright's self-imposed rule prohibited such common English words astheandhe,plurals ending in-es,past tenses ending in-ed,and even abbreviations likeMr.(since it is short forMister) orRob(forRobert). Yet the narration flows fairly smoothly, and the book was praised by critics for its literary merits.

Wright was motivated to writeGadsbyby an earlier four-stanzalipogrammatic poem of another author.

Even earlier, Spanish playwrightEnrique Jardiel Poncelapublished five short stories between 1926 and 1927, each one omitting a vowel; the best known are "El Chofer Nuevo"(" The new Driver "), without the letterA,and "Un marido sin vocación"(" A Vocationless Husband "), without theE.

Interest in lipograms was rekindled byGeorges Perec's novelLa Disparition(1969) (openly inspired by Wright'sGadsby) and its English translationA VoidbyGilbert Adair.Both works are missing the letterE,which is the most common letter in French as well as in English. A Spanish translation instead omits the letterA,the second most common letter in that language. Perec subsequently wroteLes revenentes(1972), a novel that uses no vowels except forE.Perec was a member ofOulipo,a group of French authors who adopted a variety of constraints in their work.La Disparitionis, to date, the longest lipogram in existence.

Analysing lipograms

Lipograms are sometimes dismissed by academia. "Literary history seems deliberately to ignore writing as practice, as work, as play".

In his bookRethinking Writing,Roy Harris notes that without the ability to analyse language, the lipogram would be unable to exist. He argues that "the lipogram would be inconceivable unless there were writing systems based on fixed inventories of graphic units, and unless it were possible to classify written texts on the base of the presence or absence of one of those unitsirrespective of any phonetic value it might have or any function in the script".He then continues on to argue that as the Greeks were able to invent this system of writing as they had a concept of literary notation. Harris then argues that the proof of this knowledge is found in the Greek invention of" a literate game which consists, essentially, in superimposing the structure of a notation on the structure of texts ".

Pangrammatic lipogram

Apangrammatic lipogramorlipogrammaticpangramuses every letter of the Alpha bet except one. An example omitting the letterEis:

A jovial swain should not complain
Of any buxom fair
Who mocks his pain and thinks it gain
To quiz his awkward air.

A longer example is "Fate of Nassan", an anonymous poem dating from pre-1870, where each stanza is a lipogrammatic pangram using every letter of the Alpha bet exceptE.

Bold Nassan quits his caravan,
A hazy mountain grot to scan;
Climbs jaggy rocks to find his way,
Doth tax his sight, but far doth stray.

Not work of man, nor sport of child
Finds Nassan on this mazy wild;
Lax grow his joints, limbs toil in vain—
Poor wight! why didst thou quit that plain?

Vainly for succour Nassan calls;
Know, Zillah, that thy Nassan falls;
But prowling wolf and fox may joy
To quarry on thy Arab boy.

Two other pangrammatic lipograms omitting only the letter E are:

Now focus your mind vigorously on this paragraph and on all its words. What’s so unusual about it? Don’t just zip through it quickly. Go through it slowly. Tax your brain as much as you can.

This is an unusual paragraph. It looks so ordinary and common. You would think that nothing is wrong with it, and, in fact, nothing is. But it is unusual. Can you find it? Just a quick think should do it. It is not ta xing. You should find out without any hints. All that you must know to form your solution is right in front of you. I know if you work at it a bit, it will dawn on you. It’s so amazing and so obvious though you can still miss it.

The KJV Bible unintentionally contains two lipogrammatic panagrams: Ezra 7:21 lacks onlyJ,and 1 Chronicles 12:40 lacks onlyQ.

Dropping letters

Another type of lipogram, which omits every instance of a letter from words that would otherwise contain it, as opposed to finding other words that do not contain the letter, was recorded byWillard R. Espyin181 Missing O's,based on C. C. Bombaugh'sunivocalic'Incontrovertible Facts'.

N mnk t gd t rb r cg r plt.
N fl s grss t blt Sctch cllps ht.
Frm Dnjn's tps n rnc rlls.
Lgwd, nt Lts, flds prt's bwls.
Bx tps, nt bttms, schl-bys flg fr sprt.
Trps f ld tsspts, ft, t st, cnsrt.
N cl mnsns blw sft n xfrd dns,
rthdx, dg-trt, bk-wrm Slmns.
Bld strgths f ghsts n hrrr shw.
n Lndn shp-frnts n hp-blssms grw.
T crcks f gld n dd lks fr fd.
n sft clth ftstls n ld fx dth brd.
Lng strm-tst slps frlrn, wrk n t prt.
Rks d nt rst n spns, nr wd-ccks snrt,
N dg n snw-drp r n cltsft rlls,
Nr cmmn frg cncct lng prtcls.

The above is also a conventional lipogram in omitting the letters A, E, I, and U.

American author James Thurber wroteThe W[o]nderful [O](1957), a fairy tale in which villains ban the letter 'O' from the use by the inhabitants of the island of [Oo]r[oo].

The bookElla Minnow PeabyMark Dunn(2001) is described as a "progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable": the plot of the story deals with a small country that begins to outlaw the use of various letters as the tiles of each letter fall off of a statue. As each letter is outlawed within the story, it is (for the most part) 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 forpangramsentences, all twenty-six letters are obviously in use. Also, late in the text, the author begins using letters serving ashomophonesfor the omitted letters (i.e.,PHin place of anF,Gin place ofC), which may be considered cheating. At the beginning of each chapter, the Alpha bet appears along with a sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". As the letters are removed from the story, the Alpha bet, and sentence changes.

Chapter 1: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".

Chapter 2: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY* "The quick brown fox jumps over the la*y dog".

Chapter 3: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP*RSTUVWXY* "The *uick brown fox jumps over the la*y dog".

Chapter 4: ABCDEFGHI*KLMNOP*RSTUVWXY* "The *uick brown fox *umps over the la*y dog".

Chapter 5: ABCDEFGHI*KLMNOP*RSTUVW*Y* "The *uick brown fo* *umps over the la*y dog".

Other examples

In Rebeccah Giltrow'sTwenty-Six Degrees,each chapter, narrated by a different character, deliberately excludes one of the twenty-six letters while using the other twenty-five at least once. And each of the twenty-six letters is excluded from one and only one chapter (for instance, the twelfth chapter excludesL).

Cipher and Poverty (The Book of Nothing),a book byMike Schertzer(1998), is presented as the writings of "a prisoner whose world had been impoverished to a single utterance... who can find me here in this silence". The poems that follow use only the vowelsA,E,I,andO,and consonantsC,D,F,H,L,M,N,R,S,T,andW,taken from that utterance.

Eunoia,a book written by Canadian author Christian Bök (2001), is lipogrammatic. The title uses every vowel once. Each of the five chapters in this book is a lipogram. The first chapter in this book uses only words containing the vowel "A" and no other vowel. The second chapter uses only words with no vowel but "E", and so on.

In December 2009, a collective of crime writers, Criminal Brief, published eight days of articles as a Christmas-themed lipogrammatic exercise.

In June 2013, finance authorAlan Coreypublished "The Subversive Job Search",a non-fiction lipogram that omitted the letter "Z".

In the ninth episode of the ninth season ofHow I Met Your Mother,"Platonish",Lily and Robin challenge Barney to obtain a girl's phone number without using the letterE.

A website called the Found Poetry Review asked each of its readers (as part of a larger series of challenges) to compose a poem avoiding all letters in the title of the newspaper that had already been selected. For example, if the reader was using theNew York Times,then they could not use the lettersE,I,K,M,N,O,R,S,T,W,andY.

Grant Maierhofer'sEbb,a novel published in 2023, by Kernpunkt Press, was written entirely without the letter "A".

Non-English examples

InTurkeythe tradition of "Lebdeğmezatışma "or" Dudak değmez aşık atışması "(literally: twotroubadoursthrowing verses at each other where lips do not touch each other) that is still practiced,a form of instantaneously improvised poetry sung by opposingAshikstaking turns for artfully criticising each other with one verse at a time, usually by each placing a pin between their upper and lower lips so that the improvised song, accompanied by aSaz(played by the ashik himself), consists only of labial lipograms i.e. without words where lips must touch each other, effectively excluding the letters B, F, M, P and V from the text of the improvised songs.

The seventh- or eighth-centuryDashakumaracharitabyDaṇḍinincludes a prominent lipogrammatic section at the beginning of the seventh chapter. Mantragupta is called upon to relate his adventures. However, during the previous night of vigorous lovemaking, his lips have been nibbled several times by his beloved; as a result, they are now swollen, making it painful for him to close them. Thus, throughout his narrative, he is compelled to refrain from using anylabial consonants(प,फ,ब,भ,म).

In France, J. R. Ronden premièredla Pièce sans A(The Play without A) in 1816.Jacques Aragowrote in 1853 a version of hisVoyage autour du monde(Voyage around the world), but without the lettera.Georges Perecpublished in 1969La Disparition,a novel without the lettere,the most commonly used letter of the Alpha bet in French. Its published translation into English,A Void,byGilbert Adair,won theScott Moncrieff Prizein 1995.

In Sweden, a form of lipogram was developed out of necessity at theLinköping University.Because files were shared and moved between computer platforms where the internal representation of the charactersÅ,Ä,Ö,å,ä,andö(all moderately common vowels) were different, the tradition to write comments in source code without using those characters emerged.

Zanzō ni Kuchibeni o(1989) byYasutaka Tsutsuiis a lipogrammatic novel in Japanese. The first chapter is written without the syllableあ,and usable syllables decrease as the story advances. In the last chapter, the last syllable,ん,vanishes and the story is closed.

Zero Degree(1991) byCharu Niveditais a lipogrammatic novel inTamil.The entire novel is written without the common wordஒரு(oru,"one", also used as the indefinite article), and there are no punctuation marks in the novel except dots. Later the novel was translated into English.

Russian 18th-century poetGavriil Derzhavinavoided the harshRsound (and the letterРthat represents it) in his poem "The Nightingale" to render the bird's singing.

The seventh-century Arab theologianWasil ibn Atagave a sermon without the letterrāʾ(R).However, it was the 19th-century Mufti of Damascus, Mahmud Hamza "al-Hamzawi" (d. 1887), who produced perhaps the most remarkable work of this genre with a completecommentary of the Quran(published in two volumes) without dotted letters in either the introduction or interlinear commentary.This is all the more remarkable becausedotted lettersmake up about half of the Arabic Alpha bet.

InHungarian language,the game "eszperente" is a game where people only speak using words that contain the vowel "e"; as this makes otherwise straightforward communication complicated, a lot of creative thinking is required in describing common terms in roundabout ways.

Non-literary lipograms

While a lipogram is usually limited to literary works, there are alsochromatic lipograms,works of music that avoid the use of certain notes. Examples avoiding either the second, sixth, and tenth notes, or the third, seventh, and eleventh notes in achromatic scalehave been cited.

Reverse lipogram

Areverse lipogram,also known as anantilipoortransgramis a type ofconstrained writingwhere each word must contain a particular letter in the text.

See also

• Pangram(The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog)
• Palindrome#Longest palindromes
• Letter frequency

External links

• A Loquacious Location of Lipograms(omits the letterE)
• Andrew Huang performs his own "Rapping without the letterE"
• A thread of a Hungarian forum where the members talk only in Eszperente(regularHungarian,but using only the vowelE)
• Las vocales malditasby Óscar de la Borbolla
• Lipogram article at A.Word.A.Day
• Lipogrammatic Autobiography by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• Lives of the Presidents Told in Words of One Syllableby Jean S. Remy
• Robinson Crusoe in Words of One SyllablebyMary Godolphin
• The Pilgrim's Progress in Words of One SyllablebyMary Godolphin(pseudonym of Lucy Aikin)