Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A story, poem, or other text in which one or more letters of the alphabet have been deliberately avoided.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A writing from which all words containing a particular letter are omitted, as the several books of the Odyssey of Tryphiodorus, in the first of which, it is said, there was no A, in the second no B, etc.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A writing composed of words not having a certain letter or letters; -- as in the Odyssey of Tryphiodorus there was no A in the first book, no B in the second, and so on.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A word, or writing which omits a symbol or symbols.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a text that excludes a particular letter or particular letters of the alphabet
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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For Joshua Cohen's own version of a "lipogram," a work with a missing symbol, Benjamin Israelien's void after another, now total, global decimation of the Chosen People erodes him from the inside out.
PopMatters 2010
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It's the hardest kind of lipogram, as it doesn't contain the letter E - the most common letter in the English language.
Top Headlines 2009
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A difficult task to construct a lipogram – such a short scrap was a taxing duty.
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The song reminds me of constrained writing like a lipogram or a Yngwie Malmsteen solo: technically proficient but not a lot of fun.
Stephen Belatedly Gets Into Transformative Remixes | Live Granades 2008
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Eunoia Coach House Books, 2002, a lipogram that uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002.
Archive 2008-09-01 Lemon Hound 2008
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Eunoia Coach House Books, 2002, a lipogram that uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002.
Christian Bök reads Darren Wershler Henry Lemon Hound 2008
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Inspired by the rulebound literature of Oulipo (the French coterie of poets), Eunoia consists of a univocal lipogram—a story written in five chapters, each of which uses only one vowel exclusively (the first chapter using only A, the second chapter using only E, etc.)
Christian Bok greenintegerblog 2008
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And for anyone planning on asking what a lipogram or liponym is, I present to you this post, by felisdemens.
Wednesday notes yendi 2006
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He didn't get the point of it and maybe the only thing worse was a lipogram.
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What you've just read is a lipogram - a text written without using a particular letter of the alphabet.
Top Headlines 2009
bilby commented on the word lipogram
See lipogrammatic.
December 19, 2007
oroboros commented on the word lipogram
A phrase that is missing certain letters: e.g., "By hook or by crook." has no 'e's. Georges Perec,wrote an entire book, La Disparition, without using any 'e's...along with a number of other unique works.
Also see plagiarism by anticipation.
May 23, 2008
mollusque commented on the word lipogram
How did Georges state the authorship of said book?
May 23, 2008
oroboros commented on the word lipogram
Gorgs Prc? ;oP
May 24, 2008
bilby commented on the word lipogram
"That was just grand, John, but I was thinking along a path varying a bit from that. You know that Man’s brain is actually all of him. All parts of his body, as you follow down from his brain, act simply as aids to it. His nostrils bring him air; his mouth is for masticating his food; his hands and limbs furnish ability for manipulation and locomotion; and his lungs, stomach and all inward organs function only for that brain. If you look at a crowd you say that you saw lots of folks: but if you look at a man bathing in a pond; and if that man sank until only that part from his brow upward was in sight, you might say that you saw nobody; only a man s scalp. But you actually saw a man, for a man is only as big as that part still in sight. Now a child’s skull, naturally, is not so big as a man’s; so its brain has no room for all that vast mass of thoughts which adult brains contain. It is, so to say, in a small room. But, as days and months go by, that room will push its walls outward, and that young brain gradually fill up all that additional room. So, looking for calm, cool thinking in a child is as silly as looking for big, juicy plums amongst frail spring blossoms. Why, oh, why don’t folks think of that? You know what foolish sounding things Julius was always asking, as a child. ‘How can just rubbing a match light it?’ ‘Why is it dark at night?’ ‘Why can’t a baby talk?’ But, you and I, John, didn’t laugh at him. No, not for an instant. And now look at our Julius and our Kathlyn; both famous, just through all that asking; and our aid. John, God could put Man into this world, full-grown. But God don’t do so; for God knows that, without a tiny hand to hold, a tiny foot to pat, tiny lips to kiss, and a tiny, warm, wriggling body to hug, Man would know nothing but work.�?
- Ernest Wright, 'Gadsby'.
February 15, 2009
garyth123 commented on the word lipogram
See eunoia quotes.
February 15, 2009
TankHughes commented on the word lipogram
I filled out an Ask Me Another contestant quiz the other day, and the last questions asks you to write a lipogram omitting o's. I've known the concept for a long time, but I think having written one now, the word for the concept will stay in my head, especially since I ended it with "That's my lip_gram."
Is it not related to liposuction? Lipo means fat, like lipids. Looks like the Greek ancestor was leipogrammátos meaning 'leaving out a letter.' What a difference an e makes.
November 24, 2015
bilby commented on the word lipogram
Y'all might like Ella Minnow Pea: https://www.amazon.com/Ella-Minnow-Pea-Novel-Letters/dp/0385722435
August 11, 2017
Logophile77 commented on the word lipogram
I'm gonna write a lipogram by excluding the interrobang.
December 4, 2017