Lipogram
Quick answer: A lipogram excludes a chosen letter entirely, most famously E. Learn the history from ancient Greece to Perec and how to write lipogram poetry that flows.
A lipogram is defined by absence: the writer bans one letter, or several, and composes without it. Ban Q and nobody notices. Ban E, the most common letter in English, and every sentence becomes a negotiation, since 'the', 'she', 'he', 'when', 'love' and most past tenses vanish from your toolbox at a stroke. The name comes from the Greek leipein, to leave out.
The stunt is ancient. The Greek poet Lasus of Hermione, in the sixth century BC, reportedly composed odes avoiding the letter sigma, and later writers rebuilt Homer omitting one letter per book. The modern monuments are novels: Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (1939) runs to about 50,000 words without an E, and Georges Perec's La Disparition (1969) turns the same ban into a haunting French mystery whose plot is secretly about the missing letter itself.
The rule, and choosing your ban
Pick a letter; never use it. That is the whole law. Difficulty scales with the letter's frequency, so banning E, T or A creates a serious constraint, while banning Z is a rest day. In poetry the ban applies to every word of the poem, and a single slip voids the whole game, which is why lipogrammatists proofread like auditors.
You can also stack bans, excluding several letters, at which point the lipogram shades into its cousin the univocalic, where four vowels are banned at once. Titles and epigraphs count or not as you declare; the honest convention is that everything printed obeys the rule.
Writing without your letter
Banning E teaches you where E lives. It lives in the definite article, so you write of 'a moon' not 'the moon'; it lives in past tenses, so your poem happens now; it lives in 'she' and 'he', so people get names like Anna or John. The craft therefore starts with grammar strategy, not vocabulary: choose present tense, plural or named subjects, and a diction that leans on Anglo-Saxon words like wind, moon, night, blood, song.
Draft slowly and keep a synonym bank for the words you keep reaching for. When a sentence stalls, change its shape rather than hunting a rare synonym; recasting 'she remembered the sea' as 'salt worlds go on living in that woman's mind' is the kind of forced detour that produces the lipogram's strange, fresh music. Perec's translators call this the gain of the constraint: the ban pushes you off every cliche path.
What lipograms are good for, and the trap
As finished poems, lipograms suit subjects about loss, absence and silence, where the missing letter enacts the theme; Perec, who lost his parents in the war, buried exactly that grief inside his E-less novel. As exercises, they are unmatched for breaking habitual phrasing, and many poets write one whenever their language starts feeling automatic.
The trap is announcing the trick and delivering nothing else. A lipogram whose only virtue is obedience reads like a filing exercise. Readers, and contest judges scoring emotion alongside structure, should feel the poem first and discover the constraint second, the way you can read pages of Gadsby before sensing that something is eerily absent.
What poets can take from this
- Start with a one-letter ban on a common consonant like T or S before attempting E.
- Decide grammar strategy first: tense, pronouns and articles do the heavy lifting.
- Match the banned letter to the poem's theme of loss or absence when you can.
- Keep sentences flexible; recasting beats synonym-hunting.
- Proofread backwards, word by word, to catch illegal letters.
- Never mention the constraint inside the poem; let readers find it.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about someone or something missing from your life, composed entirely without the letter E, and let the absence in the language mirror the absence in the story.
Questions
What is the most famous lipogram?
Georges Perec's 1969 French novel La Disparition, written without the letter E, is the most celebrated, alongside Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 English novel Gadsby, which performs the same feat over about 50,000 words.
Why is the letter E the usual choice to ban?
E is the most frequent letter in English and French, so excluding it creates the maximum challenge and the most audible transformation of style. Banning rare letters barely changes the language at all.
Is a lipogram the same as a univocalic?
They are related but different. A lipogram bans one or more chosen letters; a univocalic allows only a single vowel, which amounts to banning the other four vowels simultaneously.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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