![]() ![]() ![]() "Dr." (Doctor) and "P.S." ( postscript) would be allowed but not "Mr." (Mister). Wright uses abbreviations on occasion, but only if the full form is similarly lipogrammatic, e.g. Īn article in the linguistic periodical Word Ways said that 250 of the 500 most commonly used words in English were still available to Wright despite the omission of words with e. Scarcity of word options also drastically limited discussion involving quantity – Wright could not write about any number between six and thirty – pronouns, and many common words. He made extensive use of verbs that do not take the -ed suffix and constructions with "do" and "did" (for instance "did walk" instead of "walked"). In the introduction to the book (which, not being part of the story, does contain the letter 'e') Wright says his primary difficulty was avoiding the "-ed" suffix for past tense verbs. The first edition carries on title page and cover the subtitle A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter "E" (with the variant 50,000 Word Novel Without the Letter "E" on the dust jacket), sometimes dropped from late reprints.ĭespite Wright's claim, the work accidentally contains four uses of the letter "e": "the" three times and "officers" once. Though vanity published and little noticed in its time, the book has since become a favorite of fans of constrained writing and is a sought-after rarity among some book collectors. The plot revolves around the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalized as a result of the efforts of protagonist John Gadsby and a youth organizer. A work that deliberately avoids certain letters is known as a lipogram. Gadsby is a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright which does not include any words that contain the letter E, the most common letter in English. ![]()
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