Are there any English words that do not have vowels?
Ans It depends what you mean by ‘‘vowel’’ and ‘‘word.’’ There are two things we mean by the word
‘‘vowel’’ : a speech sound made with the vocal tract open a letter of the alphabet standing for a
spoken vowel (Look up vowel for a more detailed definition.) Cwm and crwth do not contain the
letters a, e, i, o, u, or y the usual vowels (that is, the usual symbols that stand for vowel sounds) in
English. But in those words the letter ‘w’ simply serves instead, standing for the same sound that
‘oo’ stands for in the words boom and booth. Dr, nth (as in ‘to the nth degree’), and TV also do not
contain any vowel symbols, but they, like cwm and crwth, do contain vowel sounds.
Shh, psst, and mm-hmm do not have vowels, either vowel symbols or vowel sounds. There is some
controversy whether they are in fact ‘‘words’’, however. But if a word is “the smallest unit of
grammar that can stand alone as a complete utterance, separated by spaces in written language
and potentially by pauses in speech” (as it is according to The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of
Language), then those do qualify. Psst, though, is the only one that appears in the Oxford English
Dictionary.
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