One Vowel and Four Consonants

• 28 Aug 2023
• 2-minute read

For fun with Common Lisp and to help solve a certain puzzle - but just a little bit - I wrote a set of tools to analyse words of just five letters.

My source list is based on Hunspell's en_GB.dic. This dictionary list is available as open source under the MPL. I created my own copy, removed lots of words starting with or containing capitals, Roman numerals, at least 444 duplicates¹, and then some other words.

From this sub-set, I see that there are some 667 English words that consist of one vowel and four consonants. In the REPL my utilities can break this down further, like this:

The list of five-letter words that have 4 vowels? That would be this:

("youse" "yahoo" "queue" "payee" "hooey" "eyrie" "eerie" "bayou"
"aurei" "audio" "aerie" "adieu" "abaya")

To round off this post, there is this plot of five letter words versus their number of vowels. Hdqrs, with only consonants, is an abbreviation. I should remove it from the list.

The graph is created from this table: