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Missing Vowels Word Search

A word search whose word list has lost its vowels. Every consonant is there and every vowel is a blank, so you fill them in from memory or find the whole word in the grid, where nothing is missing.

Theme: Farm Animals Play only this theme →

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Theme: Farm Animals

0/7
  • DNKY
  • GT
  • HN
  • LLM
  • PGLT
  • STBL
  • TRKY
Solved! 🎉

Every new puzzle here takes one of the site's 476 topics at random. To stay on one topic, open its page and set Mode to Missing Vowels. View all topics

Take the vowels out and the word is still there

A missing vowels word search shows you the list with every vowel removed. SH _ _ P is on the list; SHEEP is in the grid. Each row keeps the shape of its word, a blank for every vowel and a gap between two words, so the length is never a secret, only the vowels are.

That leaves you two ways in. You can fill the gaps in your head, which for most words takes a moment, or you can hunt for the consonants in the grid, where the word is spelled in full, and read the vowels off it. Y counts as a consonant here, as it does in the quiz round this is named after, so a word like LYNX arrives with nothing missing at all.

Why it works: the consonants carry the word

English spreads its vowels thinly. Across the 6,967 different words on this site, 38 letters in every hundred are vowels, and the rest is consonants, which is why a word with its vowels out still looks like itself. Only 18 of those words have no vowel at all, Dry, GPS, Glyph and Gym among them. Hebrew and Arabic have been written this way for thousands of years, with the consonants on the page and most vowels left for the reader to supply, and anyone who has typed TXT MSG has done the same.

Those look-alikes are the only real trap. When two rows on a list read the same, each row is still tied to its own word, so finding either one fills in the right row; you simply cannot tell in advance which of the two a row is. In practice it is rare, since the rows also have to be in the same grid.

Filling the gaps

As dealt
  • SHP
After a press of Vowel
  • SHEP
Once you have found it
  • SHEEP
One row from the Farm animals theme, at three moments. Vowel fills in one blank per press, from the left; finding the word in the grid fills in the rest.

Start with the shape. A single blank between two consonants is one of five letters and usually obvious. Two blanks together are the ones to think about: EE and OO are the commonest pairs in English, then EA and OU, so SH _ _ P and M _ _ N are quicker than they look. A blank at the very end of a word is nearly always E or Y, and Y is never missing here, so it is E. When a row still won't give, press Vowel and one blank fills in, or go to the grid: its consonants are rarer than its vowels, so a run like SH is easy to spot, and the whole word is waiting beside it.

Spelling, by the back door

Most spelling mistakes in English are vowel mistakes: SEPERATE for SEPARATE, DEFINATELY for DEFINITELY, EA where EE belongs. A list with the vowels taken out makes exactly those choices the whole puzzle, and the grid marks the answer. For a class, a spelling list on its own topic page switched to Missing Vowels is a quiet test with the marking built in: try days and months, where every row is a word children are expected to spell, or weather for longer ones. Every topic page has the mode in its Mode picker, and Play only this theme above the grid takes you to the page of whichever theme is on the board. For the other kinds of word search here, see types of word search.