The best-known words with no vowels are rhythm, crypt, lynx, myth, nymph and glyph, and every one of them leans on Y. Our 1913 Webster’s database holds 95 multi-letter entries without A, E, I, O or U, and 93 of them contain a Y. The only real word that manages without Y as well is crwth, a Welsh borrowing for an old stringed instrument.
Every list on this page comes from MyWordSolver’s own dictionary database of about 106,000 words, built on the 1913 Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Because that dictionary is more than a century old, some entries are archaic spellings or specialist terms, and we’ve marked those separately from the words you’ll actually use.
What counts as a vowel here?
For this list, a “word with no vowels” is one that contains none of the five letters A, E, I, O and U. That’s the definition most word games and puzzles use. In speech, though, every English syllable needs a vowel sound, and in these words the letter Y supplies it: the Y in sky sounds like a long I, and the Y in myth sounds like a short I. So Y is doing a vowel’s job, even if it isn’t on the list of five.
Welsh goes a step further and treats W as a vowel too, which is how crwth came to be spelled the way it is.
The numbers
| Group | Entries |
|---|---|
| All entries with no A, E, I, O or U | 116 |
| Single letters (the dictionary has an entry for each letter, such as B and Z) | 21 |
| Multi-letter entries | 95 |
| Multi-letter entries that contain Y | 93 |
| Multi-letter entries with no Y either | 2 (crwth, and th, a suffix entry as in “fourth”) |
We also set aside five entries that look like scanning errors or that we couldn’t confirm as real words: cytty, rysh, ryth, snypy and wyd. Leaving those out, along with the suffix th, gives the 89 words below.
Words with no vowels, by length
The “familiar” column holds words you’ll find in a modern dictionary and could use in conversation. The other column holds rare words, old spellings, proper names and technical terms that the 1913 Webster’s recorded.
| Length | Count | Familiar words | Rare, old or specialist words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 letters | 9 | by, my | fy, hy, ky, ny, sy, ys, yt |
| 3 letters | 29 | cry, dry, fly, fry, ply, pry, shy, sky, sly, spy, sty, thy, try, why, wry | gry, gyb, gyn, gyp, hyp, kyd, lym, lyn, nys, pyx, rys, sny, syb, wys |
| 4 letters | 22 | cyst, hymn, lynx, myth, scry, spry | byss, fyrd, glyn, phyz, pnyx, rynd, styx, syrt, syth, tydy, tymp, tynd, tyny, wynd, wynn, xyst |
| 5 letters | 21 | crypt, dryly, glyph, gypsy, lymph, lynch, myrrh, nymph, pygmy, shyly, slyly, sylph, tryst | crwth, cymry, dryth, ghyll, hyrst, kymry, thymy, xylyl |
| 6 letters | 7 | rhythm, syzygy | flysch, lymphy, plyght, styryl, stythy |
| 7 letters | 1 | none | nymphly |
Three-letter words are the biggest group, and most of the familiar ones follow the same pattern: one or two consonants and a final Y. For more three-letter options, see our list of 3 letter words without vowels.
The longest familiar words are rhythm and syzygy, both six letters. The overall record holder is nymphly, an old adjective meaning “like a nymph”, at seven.
How Y does the work
In every familiar word on the list, Y is carrying the vowel sound. It does this in a few different ways:
- Y as a long I (as in “eye”): by, cry, dry, fly, my, shy, sky, sly, spy, try, why
- Y as a short I (as in “sit”): crypt, cyst, glyph, hymn, lymph, lynx, myth, nymph, tryst
- Y as an “ee” sound at the end of a word: the final Y in dryly, gypsy, pygmy, shyly and slyly
Eighteen of the 95 entries contain two or more Y’s. The familiar ones are dryly, gypsy, pygmy, shyly, slyly and syzygy, and syzygy is the only word on the whole list with three. Its other letters are S, Z and G, which makes it a favorite of word-game fans.
Rhythm is a curiosity of its own: it has two syllables but only one vowel letter. The second syllable gets by on the M sound alone.
If you’re working through letter patterns, our list of words starting or ending with Y shows how often Y lands at the end of a word.
Crwth and the Welsh borrowings
Crwth is the standout. It names a medieval Welsh stringed instrument, a kind of lyre played with a bow, and it’s pronounced roughly “krooth”. In Welsh, W is a vowel that sounds like “oo”, so to a Welsh speaker the word has a perfectly ordinary vowel. English once borrowed it in the form “crowd”, an old word for a fiddle.
Two more Welsh borrowings appear in the list: Cymry and its variant Kymry, the Welsh people’s name for themselves. Both use Welsh Y as their vowel. You may have heard of cwm, another Welsh word meaning a bowl-shaped mountain hollow, but it isn’t an entry in our 1913 Webster’s.
Rare words explained
Some of the less familiar words are worth knowing, if only for the look on your opponent’s face:
- fyrd: the Anglo-Saxon militia, raised from the free men of a district.
- flysch: a thick sequence of sandstone and shale layers, a term from the geology of the Alps.
- ghyll: a ravine with a stream running through it; a spelling of “gill” used in northern England.
- hyrst: an old spelling of “hurst”, a wooded hill or grove.
- lym: a hound led on a leash, a word Shakespeare uses in King Lear.
- phyz: a slang word for the face, short for “physiognomy” (more often spelled phiz).
- pyx: a small container for the consecrated bread of the Eucharist.
- scry: to try to see the future by gazing into a crystal ball or other surface.
- sylph: an imaginary spirit of the air; also a slim, graceful person.
- syzygy: in astronomy, the lining up of three bodies, such as the sun, the moon and the earth.
- thymy: full of, or smelling of, thyme.
- wynd: a narrow lane or alley, especially in Scottish towns.
- wynn: an Old English letter used for the W sound.
- xyst: a long covered walk used for exercise in ancient Greece.
- Pnyx and Styx: proper names. The Pnyx is the hill in Athens where the citizens’ assembly met; the Styx is the river of the underworld in Greek myth.
- styryl and xylyl: names of chemical groups in organic chemistry.
Using no-vowel words in word games
Wordle and other five-letter games
Among the 472 five-letter words in our dictionary that also appear on a list of the 3,000 most common English words, every single one contains at least one of A, E, I, O or U. So if you’ve grayed out all five vowels, the answer almost certainly uses Y as its vowel, and it’s probably one of the less common words in the five-letter row above. CRYPT, GLYPH, LYMPH, LYNCH, NYMPH and SYLPH all use five different letters, which makes them useful guesses; browse more in our 5-letter words with no repeating letters.
Y itself is worth testing early. It appears in 1,078 of our 6,437 five-letter words (16.7%) and is the second most common last letter, ending 782 of them. For the opposite problem, words packed with vowels, see our guide to 5-letter words with the most vowels, and for opening guesses, see the best Wordle starting words, ranked by letter frequency.
Scrabble and crosswords
No-vowel words are handy when your rack is full of consonants. Keep in mind that a word appearing in the 1913 Webster’s doesn’t make it legal in Scrabble, so check your game’s official word list before playing anything from the “rare” column. Crossword setters, on the other hand, love words like CRWTH and SYZYGY precisely because they look impossible.
If letter constraints are your thing, you may also enjoy our list of words without double vowels and double consonants.