a written work composed of words chosen so as to avoid the use of one or more specific alphabetic characters.
I went off to Wikipedia to find some examples, and was immediately reminded of this contemporary poetry best seller -
- In Christian Bök's novel (?) Eunoia (2001), each chapter is restricted to a single vowel, missing four of the five vowels. For example the fourth chapter does not contain 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 has been called univocalic.[1]
There is also a wonderful old poem I hadn't read before:
- Fate of Nassan, an anonymous poem dating from pre-1870, where each stanza is a lipogrammatic pangram (using every letter of the alphabet except "E").[10]
Bold Nassan quits his caravan,A hazy mountain grot to scan;To quarry on thy Arab boy.
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
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