English words without vowels 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 word is "tsktsks", pronounced . The mathematical expression "nth" , as in "delighted to
English alphabet is a ligature for the letters "Et". In English and many other languages it is used to represent the word "and" and occasionally the Latin word "et", as in the abbreviation "&c" (et cetera). The apostrophe, while not considered part of the English alphabet, is used to contract English words. A few pairs of words, such as "its" (belonging to "it") and "it's" ("it is" or "it has"), "were" (form of 'to be') and "we're" (we are), and "shed" (to get rid of) and "she'd" ("she would" or "she had") are distinguished in writing only by the presence or absence