English words without vowels forms are reflected in orthography as contractions, such as "s", "ll", "d", and "n't". English words without vowels English orthography 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. There are very few lexical words (that is, not counting interjections) without vowel letters. The longest such lexical
Cardinal vowels the opposite side of the front-back dimension, so that e.g. Cardinal 1 can be produced with rounding somewhat similar to that of Cardinal 8 (though normally compressed rather than protruded); these are known as 'secondary cardinal vowels'. Sounds such as these are claimed to be less common in the world's languages. Other vowel sounds are also recognised on the vowel chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet. In the , the cardinal vowels have the same numbers used above, but added to 300. The usual explanation of the cardinal vowel system implies that the competent user can reliably distinguish between sixteen