Vowelstripping

Vowelstripping is a text processing technique that removes vowels from strings of text, typically the letters a, e, i, o, and u, with optional handling of y as a vowel. It can be applied to individual words, phrases, or entire corpora. The result is a consonant skeleton of the original text, sometimes used for obfuscation, stylization, or compact representation in certain processing pipelines.

Variants vary: complete vowel removal; selective removal (for example, only short vowels); and rules that preserve spaces and punctuation. Some implementations treat text case-insensitively, while others preserve the original casing in the remaining characters. Diacritics and non-Latin vowels may be included or excluded depending on the rules used.

Examples illustrate the effect. Vowelstripping("vowelstripping") yields "vwlstrppng", and "information retrieval" becomes "nfrmtn rtrvl". Such examples show how vowels disappear while consonants remain readable to a degree, though fluency and pronunciation are lost.

Applications span several domains. In linguistics and phonology, vowelstripping can help analyze consonant structure or syllable patterns. In information retrieval and text processing, it can serve as a compact representation or a form of preprocessing for specific algorithms. It is also used in stylized writing, branding, or placeholders, and in some cryptographic contexts as a light obfuscation technique rather than secure encryption.

Limitations include substantial readability loss and potential information loss, since vowels often carry important grammatical and prosodic information. Reconstruction of the original text from a stripped form is often ambiguous or impossible without additional data. Implementations commonly rely on simple pattern replacements, such as removing all vowels from the text.