lipogram
Sign in to savethumb|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.
Article
11 sectionsContents
- History
- Analysing lipograms
- Pangrammatic lipogram
- Dropping letters
- Other examples
- Non-English examples
- Non-literary lipograms
- Reverse lipogram
- See also
- References
- External links
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.
Writing a lipogram may be a trivial task when avoiding uncommon letters like Z, J, Q, or X, but it is much more challenging to avoid common letters like E, T, or A in the English language, 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.