Constrained writing

thumb|Animation of a half-turn ambigram of the word ambigram, with 180-degree rotational symmetry An ambigram is a calligraphic composition of glyphs (letters, numbers, symbols or other shapes) that can yield different meanings depending on the orientation of observation. Most ambigrams are visual palindromes that rely on some kind of symmetry, and they can often be interpreted as visual puns. Although the concept is older, the term "ambigram" was coined by Douglas Hofstadter in 1983–1984.

thumb|Plaque in tribute to Georges Perec by [[Christophe Verdon. Café de la Mairie, Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris]] A lipogram (from , 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. Extended Ancient Greek texts avoiding the letter sigma are the earliest examples of lipograms.

Chinese poem consisting of 1000 characters, each used only once, arranged into 250 lines and grouped into four line rhyming stanzas

Oulipo (, short for ; roughly translated as "workshop of potential literature", stylized OuLiPo) is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior and Jean Lescure, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.

The is a Japanese poem. Originally the poem was attributed to Kūkai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, but more modern research has found the date of composition to be later in the Heian period (794–1179). The first record of its existence dates from 1079. It is famous because it is a perfect pangram, containing each character of the Japanese syllabary exactly once. Because of this, it is also used as an ordering for the syllabary, in the same way as the A, B, C, D... sequence of the Latin alphabet.

one-syllable article by Yuen Ren Chao

thumb|upright=1.3|Chronogram on the Belfry of Thuin in Belgium: " reæDIfICor baptIstæ CherMan̄e soLertIa" thumb|Portrait of Henry van Gameren, with Chronogram A chronogram is a sentence or inscription in which specific letters, interpreted as numerals (such as Roman numerals), stand for a particular date when rearranged. The word, meaning "time writing", derives from the Greek words chronos (χρόνος "time") and gramma (γράμμα, "letter").

A tautogram (Greek: tauto gramma, "same letter") is a text in which all words start with the same letter.

1978 novel by Georges Perec

reads both horizonally and vertically

1960 children's book by Dr. Seuss

Dashakumaracharita (The narrative of ten young men, IAST: Daśa-kumāra-Carita, Devanagari: दशकुमारचरित) is a prose romance in Sanskrit, attributed to Dandin (दण्डी), written in the seventh to eighth centuries CE.

composition with constraints

"Lebdeğmez atışma" or "Dudak değmez aşık atışması" in Turkey, whose literal meaning in Turkish is "two troubadours throwing verses at each other where lips do not touch each other", is the traditional and still practiced event of oratory match, a form of instantaneously improvised poetry sang by opposing Ashiks taking turns for artfully criticising each other with one verse at a time, is done by each first placing a pin between their upper and lower lips so that the improvised song, usually accompanied by a Saz (played by the ashik himself), consists only of labial lipograms i.e. without words

A univocalic is a type of antilipogrammatic constrained writing that uses only consonants and a single vowel, in English "A", "E", "I", "O", or "U", and no others.