What Is a Lipogram?
Quick answer: A lipogram is writing that deliberately avoids one or more letters, from Gadsby to Perec's A Void. History, famous examples and how to try one in a poem.
A lipogram is a piece of writing composed while deliberately avoiding one or more letters of the alphabet. The term comes from Greek, roughly 'leaving out a letter'. The difficulty scales with the target: drop Q or Z from an English text and nobody will ever notice, but drop E, the most common letter in the language, and every sentence becomes a small feat of engineering, since 'the', 'she', 'he', 'love', 'here' and most past tenses vanish from your toolkit at a stroke.
It is tempting to file the lipogram under party tricks, and plenty of lipograms are exactly that. But the constraint has a serious history stretching from ancient Greece to one of the strangest masterpieces of twentieth-century fiction, and a serious argument behind it: forbidding yourself the obvious words forces you toward words you would never otherwise have chosen. For a poet in a rut, that forced detour can be worth more than a month of waiting for inspiration to knock.
A very old game
The lipogram is one of the oldest recorded writing games. Ancient tradition credits Lasus of Hermione, a Greek poet of the sixth century BC, with composing odes that avoided the letter sigma, reportedly because he disliked its hiss. Later writers told of Tryphiodorus producing a version of the Odyssey in which each of the twenty-four books did without a different letter of the Greek alphabet. In Spain's Golden Age, Lope de Vega was credited with five prose tales, each omitting one of the five vowels.
A caution belongs here: most of these early reports reach us secondhand, from writers working long after the fact, and the texts themselves are largely lost. Scholars hold the details lightly. What the anecdotes establish beyond doubt is the impulse's antiquity. For as long as alphabets have existed, writers have tested themselves by locking one door of the alphabet and writing through the rest of the house.
The famous modern monsters
The lipogram's modern legend rests on two novels. In 1939 Ernest Vincent Wright self-published Gadsby, a story of about fifty thousand words containing no letter E; he is said to have tied down the E key of his typewriter to keep himself honest. Thirty years later the French writer Georges Perec published La Disparition (1969), a full-length mystery novel without E, in which the constraint is also the plot: something is missing from the characters' world, and they cannot quite name it. Gilbert Adair's English translation, A Void, performs the astonishing double feat of translating the book while keeping the ban.
Perec belonged to the Oulipo, the Paris-based workshop of potential literature founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, whose members treat constraints as machines for generating literature and who famously described themselves as rats that build the maze they intend to escape from. Perec followed his E-less novel with Les Revenentes, a novella in which E is the only vowel permitted. In poetry, the Canadian writer Christian Bök spent seven years on Eunoia (2001), whose five main chapters each allow only a single vowel, and the book became a bestseller, proof that a hard constraint can reach readers far outside the avant-garde.
Why poets bother
The case for the lipogram is the case for all form, sharpened to a point. Metre forbids certain rhythms; rhyme forbids most line endings; the sonnet forbids the fifteenth line. Poets accept these bans because pushing against them produces phrases that free writing never finds. The lipogram simply makes the mechanism visible. Ban E and you cannot write 'the sea'; you must write 'salt water', 'a grey swell', 'that cold flat glass', and suddenly you are describing rather than labelling.
There is also a quieter benefit: the constraint occupies the anxious, self-judging part of the mind. With your attention absorbed by the letter game, the censor that usually vets every phrase for profundity is too busy to interfere, and odd, true material slips through. Many writers use a lipogram the way runners use interval training, not as the event itself but as conditioning: after an afternoon of E-less drafting, ordinary composition feels roomy, and your vocabulary has been forcibly stretched.
The letter-game family
The lipogram sits inside a whole family of alphabet constraints worth knowing:
Try it: a small lipogram in verse
Here is an original quatrain written without the letter E: 'A black gull hangs in a hot sky, / calling out across salt flats, / and I stand still, holding my hat, / as wind picks up and clouds roll by.' Nothing about those lines announces the constraint, which is the point; the ban did its work invisibly, steering the draft away from stock phrasing ('the seagull', 'the beach', 'the breeze') toward plainer, harder nouns.
The reliable method is translation rather than composition. Write the passage freely first, saying what you actually mean. Then convert it, replacing every outlawed word, and treat each replacement as a genuine second draft decision rather than a synonym hunt: often the best fix is to rebuild the whole clause. Finally, read the result aloud to someone without mentioning the game. If they notice nothing but the poem, the lipogram has succeeded twice.
Pitfalls, and how to dodge them
The form's characteristic failure is the poem that is only its trick. Readers will forgive strangeness, but they can smell strain: inverted syntax, obsolete words dragged in for their spelling, meaning bent double to dodge a letter. When that happens the constraint has moved from engine room to centre stage, and the fix is usually to loosen your ambition, choosing a rarer letter to ban, or shortening the poem, rather than to push harder.
The deeper principle is that a constraint is a means of discovery, not a certificate of merit. Perec's E-less novel endures because the missing letter mirrors the book's grief, an absence the story circles without naming; the constraint and the content are the same thing. Aim for that unity at whatever scale you work. A lipogram about loss, silence, censorship or anything else defined by a missing piece will always outperform a lipogram written to prove you could.
What poets can take from this
- Start with a mid-frequency letter like T or S before attempting the notorious E.
- Draft freely first, then translate into the constraint; rebuilding whole clauses beats hunting synonyms.
- Keep a running list of banned everyday words (with E gone: the, she, he, were, very) pinned above your desk.
- Read the finished piece to someone without revealing the game, and count what they notice.
- Match the missing letter to the poem's subject so absence means something.
- Use a text search for the banned letter before calling any draft finished; eyes always miss a few.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about someone or something missing from your life, composed entirely without the first letter of that person's or thing's name, and never mention the constraint in the poem.
Questions
What is the most famous lipogram?
Georges Perec's 1969 novel La Disparition, written in French without the letter E and translated into E-less English by Gilbert Adair as A Void. Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 novel Gadsby, also E-less, is the famous English-language predecessor.
Which letter is hardest to avoid in English?
E, by a wide margin, since it is the most frequent letter and sits inside the definite article, most pronouns and most past-tense endings. After E, the toughest bans are the other high-frequency letters: T, A, O and N.
Is a lipogram a poetic form?
Not in the way a sonnet is; it is a constraint that can be applied to any form or to prose. A poem can be simultaneously a sonnet and a lipogram, and the two kinds of rule interact in interesting ways, which is much of the appeal.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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