“This is a lipogram – a book, paragraph or similar thing in writing that lacks a symbol, particularly (but not always) that symbol fifth in rank out of our 26 script-signs (found amidst ‘d’ and ‘f’), which stands for a sound such as that in ‘kiwi’. I won’t bring it up right now, to avoid spoiling it. I could play with lipograms morning, noon and night. So it is with joy that I submit to you this location for lipogram fanatics to join as a unit to glorify this form of wordplay.”
As you’ve undoubtedly noticed, the lipogram in the first paragraph (it’s by Stephen Chrisomalis) doesn’t include any “e”s. Technically any piece of text can be a lipogram as long as it omits one specific letter, but because “e” is the most common letter, and thus the biggest challenge, that’s the one that’s nearly always omitted (at least on purpose). Up until this sentence, of course, this very paragraph lacks several letters, including “j” and“x.”
The word “lipogram” is an adaptation of an actual Greek word: “lipogrammatos.” The Greek version combines “lip-“, meaning “in want of”, and “grammos” a letter. The original Greek was never, as far as anyone knows, used to mean the sort of word puzzle we mean by “lipogram”, though. The word “lipogram” was introduced to English by Joseph Addison in 1711. Addison was a well-known essayist and the co-founder of the magazine The Spectator, which is where most of his essays were published. He also wrote plays and poems, some of which were very popular. And in his spare time he was the British undersecretary of state and a member of Parliament.
You might think that Addison enjoyed word puzzles like constructing lipograms, since he’s the first one to use the word in print, and might even have coined it himself. But it was very much the opposite; he hated the whole idea. He thought any form of fooling around with words or letters was an attempt at humor that just wasn’t legitimate: “…false Wit chiefly consists in the Resemblance and Congruity sometimes of single Letters, as in Anagrams, Chronograms, Lipograms, and Acrosticks; Sometimes of Words, as in Punns…; and sometimes of whole Sentences or Poems, cast into the Figures of Eggs, Axes or Altars …”
And by the way, this post — all five paragraphs — is itself a lipogram; there’s at least one letter missing. It’s an easy one, though.
