lipogram

A lipogram is a form of constrained writing in which text is produced without using one or more specified letters. The word lipogram comes from the Greek leipein, to leave, and gramma, letter.

Historically, lipograms appear in various traditions, but the modern practice is associated with the French literary collective Oulipo in the 1960s. The most famous examples are Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (1939), a 50,000-word novel without the letter e, and Georges Perec's La Disparition (1969), a French novel that omits the letter e; its English translation, A Void, maintains the constraint.

Variations include lipograms that omit other letters, or multiple letters; there are univocalic lipograms that allow only one vowel in the entire text, or only a single vowel in each section. A notable example is Christian Bök's Eunoia, a collection of five univocalic chapters using only one vowel per chapter.

In literary practice, lipograms are used as playful, rigorous experiments that test linguistic resourcefulness and offer new ways to shape meaning. They are discussed within the broader study of constrained writing, where authors employ formal rules to guide composition rather than constrain it.