Missing Vowels

A text or message without vowels is a message whose letters A, E, I, O, U and Y are missing (sometimes the Y is considered a consonant). Removing them generally makes the text less intelligible, which can be an intellectual exercise.

This form of playful encryption or coding challenges the user's contextual deduction skills and vocabulary knowledge.

A word whose vowels have been deleted is therefore composed of consonants only. The human brain has a certain capacity to reconstruct the original word, taking into account only the consonants, the brain manages to guess the removed vowels. This principle works all the better as Latin languages such as English or French tend to alternate vowels and consonants.

For a computer like dCode it's more complicated to reconstruct a sentence and find missing vowels without knowing the context, but it can list all possible words in a given dictionary.

To remove the vowels from a word is to go through each letter of the word and remove it if it is among 'A, E, I, O, U, Y'.

There are many reasons to remove vowels:

— Create puzzles and language games, stimulate creativity and learn spelling.

— Abbreviate messages, condense information.

— Develop deduction and observation strategies (word recognition training).