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
International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects This chart shows the most common applications of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent English language pronunciations. See Pronunciation respelling for English for phonetic transcriptions used in different dictionaries. This chart gives a partial system of diaphonemes for English. The symbols for the diaphonemes are given in bold, followed by their most common phonetic values. For the vowels, a separate phonetic value is given for each major dialect, and words used to name corresponding lexical sets are also given. The diaphonemes and lexical sets given here are based on RP and General