English orthography typically represents vowel sounds with the five conventional vowel letters . The letter is largely recognized as being a vowel in specific contexts, though often disregarded when talking about vowelless words, which typically focus on the absence of the main five. A word with , but no other vowel letters, may thus be considered vowelless in this context. To a lesser degree, the letter can act as a vowel in a narrow subset of loanwords.
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.
There are very few lexical words (that is, not counting interjections) without vowel letters. The longest such lexical word is ', pronounced . The mathematical expression ' , as in delighted to the nth degree, is in fairly common usage. Another mathematical term without vowel letters is ln, the natural logarithm. A more obscure example is rng , derived from ring by deleting the letter .
In the Middle English period, there were no standard spellings, but was sometimes used to represent either a vowel or a consonant sound in the same way that Modern English does with , particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries. This vocalic generally represented , as in wss ("use"). However at that time the form was still sometimes used to represent a digraph (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 this way, such as:
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, pfft, pht, phpht, psst, sh, shh, zzz. Many of these words feature continuant consonants, which make up for the lack of vowels. The status of whether onomatopoeia are truly words is disputed, though officially, they are in fact words.
Vowelless proper names from other languages, such as the East-Asian surname Ng, may retain their conventional spelling, even if they are pronounced with vowels. Ng in particular can be pronounced a variety of ways depending on the person, often without a vowel sound (in the case of it being pronounced ), and sometimes with. The name Brynn is a different example, as it contains a vowel sound though spelled with . From Greek, names containing upsilon (ÃÂ¥) may be Romanized with , resulting in names like Nyx and Styx.
Some of these are onomatopoeia, some promoted by comic magazines (see above). Many others are derived from other languages, most commonly Greek, e.g. glyph (Greek), skyr (Icelandic), and fyrd (Anglo-Saxon). Names are excluded from the list.
Words styled in bold indicate words that do not contain Y or W. Words labelled in indicate a word that does not contain a vowel sound in GA English.
Weak forms of function words may be realized without vowel sounds, as in I can go and I must sell . Some of these forms are reflected in orthography as contractions, such as s, ll, d, and n't.