Words without consonants


Most languages of the world allow syllables without consonants, and monosyllabic words may therefore consist of a single vowel. Examples in English are a, O, I, eye. A smaller number of languages allow sequences of such syllables, and thus may have polysyllabic words without consonants. This list excludes monosyllables and words such as English whoa and yeah which contain the semivowels y and w.

English

English has very few words of more than one syllable without a consonant, apart from proper names such as Aeaea, Aiea, Aia, Io, Eiao, Oea, and sometimes Iowa, and perhaps a few taxonomic terms such as Iouea below.
Esperanto has a limited number of words with vowel sequences, such as boao 'boa'. Almost all have consonants, apart from the indefinite correlatives and mimesis.
Words that don't follow grammatical declination:
Words that follow grammatical declination, but remain the same in Genitive and Partitive cases:
Words that follow grammatical declination, but remain the same in both Genitive and Partitive cases:
Words that follow grammatical declination, change in Genitive and Partitive cases and still contain only vowels:
Words that contain consonants in the Nominative case, but contain only vowels in the Genitive case:
have numerous words with glottal stop, such as Hawaiian āaua "coarse", aeoia "to be well supplied", uauooa "distant voices", which may be spelled with all vowels in English transcription; however, okina is a full consonant, and such words will not be considered here.
has numerous words, such as ai "love", which are borrowed from Chinese or are composed of Chinese loans and have no consonants. A smaller number of native words fit this description as well.
has a few words without consonants:
They can be used to create full sentences without any consonants:
uses the digraphs bh, dh, gh, mh, th to separate vowels in hiatus. Examples include:
The small list of vowel-only words in Spanish is expanded by the fact that the letter h is soundless in this language.
Many Bantu languages allow vowel sequences. In Swahili, this is sometimes due to the disappearance of the consonant /l/.