Words that use every vowel, and words that use none
A e i o u — five letters carrying 37.8% of every letter in our dictionary. Y is treated as a consonant in every figure on this page, even though it sometimes behaves like a vowel in speech. Ranked against each other by how often they occur, the order is E I A O U — E on its own accounts for 11.5% of all letters in the dictionary, more than any other vowel, with I not far behind at 8.9%.
Words with all five vowels
1,881 words in our dictionary — out of 168,401 — use A, E, I, O and U at least once each. Common ones first:
202 of the 1,881 end in -TION and 103 end in -OUS. Between them, those two suffixes account for a good share of the list, because both endings reliably rope in the letters this page is about, on top of whatever vowels the root word already supplied.
All five, in alphabetical order
A stricter version: the vowels not just present but appearing in the order A-E-I-O-U as you read the word, each exactly once. Only 6 words in our dictionary manage it:
Words with no vowels at all
Because Y counts as a consonant here, a word built entirely from consonants and Y has no A, E, I, O or U. 121 words in our dictionary qualify — the complete list:
Most of them lean on Y to carry the syllable, as in MYTH or GYM; a few, such as RHYTHM, lean on a consonant doing a vowel's job instead.
The most vowel-heavy word at each length
Ranking every word by the share of its letters that are vowels, one word leads at each length in our dictionary. The best case falls as length grows: at the shortest length a word can be all vowels; by the longest, the leader still has to carry some consonants:
| Length | Word | Vowel share |
|---|---|---|
| 2 letters | AA | 100% |
| 3 letters | EAU | 100% |
| 4 letters | AEON | 75% |
| 5 letters | AALII | 80% |
| 6 letters | AALIIS | 67% |
| 7 letters | ABOULIA | 71% |
| 8 letters | ABOIDEAU | 75% |
| 9 letters | ABOIDEAUS | 67% |
| 10 letters | AUTOECIOUS | 70% |
| 11 letters | AETIOLOGIES | 64% |
| 12 letters | ONOMATOPOEIA | 67% |
| 13 letters | AEROBIOLOGIES | 62% |
| 14 letters | AEROBIOLOGICAL | 57% |
| 15 letters | EPIZOOTIOLOGIES | 60% |
Vowels overall
Across the full 168,401-word dictionary, 37.8% of all letter occurrences are vowels. Restrict the count to our common words and the share barely moves, to 37.7% — vowel-heaviness is one of the few letter statistics that does not shift much between an everyday vocabulary and the full dictionary. The full letter-by-letter picture, vowels and consonants both, is in the letter-frequency guide; every length referenced above has its own list on the words-by-length hub.