Lipogram

A lipogram (from Ancient Greek: λειπογράμματος, leipográmmatos, "leaving out a letter") is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided—usually a common vowel, and frequently E, the most common letter in the English language. Larousse defines a lipogram as a "literary work in which one compels oneself strictly to exclude one or several letters of the alphabet". Extended Ancient Greek texts avoiding the letter sigma are the earliest examples of lipograms.

Writing a lipogram may be a trivial task when avoiding uncommon letters like Z, J, Q, or X, but it is much more difficult to avoid common letters like E, T, or A, as the author must omit many ordinary words. Grammatically meaningful and smooth-flowing lipograms can be difficult to compose. Identifying lipograms can also be problematic, as there is always the possibility that a given piece of writing in any language may be unintentionally lipogrammatic. For example, Poe's poem The Raven contains no Z, but there is no evidence that this was intentional.

A pangrammatic lipogram is a text that uses every letter of the alphabet except one. For example, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" omits the letter S, which the usual pangram includes by using the word jumps.

The word lipogram is not always included in dictionaries. This may be due to the authors of lipograms often being dismissed by academia. "Literary history seems deliberately to ignore writing as practice, as work, as play".

Lasus of Hermione, who lived during the second half of the sixth century BCE, is the most ancient author of a lipogram. This makes the lipogram, according to Quintus Curtius Rufus, "the most ancient systematic artifice of Western literature". Lasus did not like the sigma, and excluded it from one of his poems, entitled Ode to the Centaurs, of which nothing remains; as well as a Hymn to Demeter, of which the first verse remains:

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