typically represents vowel sounds with the five conventional vowel letters, as well as, which may also be a consonant depending on context. However, outside of abbreviations, there are a handful of words in English that do not have vowels, either because the vowel sounds are not written with vowel letters or because the words themselves are pronounced without vowel sounds.
Words without written vowels
There are very few lexical words without vowel letters. The longest such lexical word is ', pronounced. The mathematical expression', as in delighted to the nth degree, is in fairly common usage. Another mathematical term without vowel letters is ln, the natural logarithm. A more obscure example is rng, derived from ring by deleting the letter. Vowelless proper names from other languages, such as the surname Ng, may retain their original spelling, even if they are pronounced with vowels. In the Middle English period, there were no standard spellings, but was sometimes used to represent either a vowel or a consonant sound in the same way that Modern English does with, particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries. This vocalic generally represented, as in wss. However at that time the form was still sometimes used to represent a digraph , not as a separate letter. This practice exists in modernWelsh orthography so that words borrowed from Welsh may use this way, such as:
A cwm is used in English in a technical geographical or mountaineering context to mean a deep hollow in a mountainous area, usually with steep edges on some sides, like a corrie or cirque, such as the Western Cwm of Mount Everest. It is also sometimes used, by way of more recent borrowing from Welsh, in a more general sense of a valley. The spellings coombe, combe, coomb, and combcome from the Old Englishcumb, which appears either to be a much earlier borrowing from a predecessor of modern Welsh, or to have an even earlier origin, given that there was an ancient Greek word κὑμβη meaning a hollow vessel. In English literature, one can find the spellings combe, coomb or comb.
There are also numerous vowelless interjections and onomatopoeia found more or less frequently, including brr, bzzt, grrr, hm, hmm, mm, mmm, mhmm, pfft, pht, phpht, psst, sh, shh, zzz.
Words without vowel sounds
of function words may be realized without vowel sounds, as in I can go and I must sell. Some of these forms are reflected in orthography as contractions, such as s, ll, d, and n't.
