[1][2] Extended Ancient Greek texts avoiding the letter sigma are the earliest examples of lipograms.
Lasus of Hermione, who lived during the second half of the sixth century BCE, is the most ancient author of a lipogram.
[4] Lasus did not like the sigma, and excluded it from one of his poems, entitled Ode to the Centaurs, of which nothing remains; as well as a Hymn to Demeter, of which the first verse remains:[4] Δάματρα μέλπω Κόραν τε Κλυμένοι᾽ ἄλοχον μελιβόαν ὕμνον ἀναγνέων Αἰολίδ᾽ ἂμ βαρύβρομον ἁρμονίαν Dámatra mélpô Kóran te Klyménoi᾽ álochon melibóan hýmnon anagnéôn Aiolíd᾽ ám barýbromon harmonían I chant of Demeter and Kore, Wife of the famed [Hades] Lifting forth a gentle-voiced hymn In the deep-toned Aeolian mode.
[3] Twelve centuries after Tryphiodorus wrote his lipogrammatic Odyssey, in 1711, the influential London essayist and journalist Joseph Addison commented on this work (although it had been lost), arguing that "it must have been amusing to see the most elegant word of the language rejected like "a diamond with a flaw in it" if it was tainted by the proscribed letter".
[7] Petrus Riga, a canon of Sainte-Marie de Reims during the 11th century, translated the Bible, and due to its scriptural obscurities called it Aurora.
[8] There is a tradition of German and Italian lipograms excluding the letter R dating from the seventeenth century until modern times.
While some authors excluded other letters, it was the exclusion of the R which ensured the practice of the lipogram continued into modern times.
[10] One of the most remarkable examples of a lipogram is Ernest Vincent Wright's novel Gadsby (1939), which has over 50,000 words but not a single letter E.[12] Wright's self-imposed rule prohibited such common English words as the and he, plurals ending in -es, past tenses ending in -ed, and even abbreviations like Mr. (since it is short for Mister) or Rob (for Robert).
[15] Even earlier, Spanish playwright Enrique Jardiel Poncela published five short stories between 1926 and 1927, each one omitting a vowel; the best known are "El Chofer Nuevo" ("The new Driver"), without the letter A, and "Un marido sin vocación" ("A Vocationless Husband"), without the E.[16][17] Interest in lipograms was rekindled by Georges Perec's novel La Disparition (1969) (openly inspired by Wright's Gadsby) and its English translation A Void by Gilbert Adair.
[19] In his book Rethinking Writing, Roy Harris notes that without the ability to analyse language, the lipogram would be unable to exist.
An example omitting the letter E is:[21] A jovial swain should not complain Of any buxom fair Who mocks his pain and thinks it gain To quiz his awkward air.
A longer example is "Fate of Nassan", an anonymous poem dating from pre-1870, where each stanza is a lipogrammatic pangram using every letter of the alphabet except E.[22] Bold Nassan quits his caravan, A hazy mountain grot to scan; Climbs jaggy rocks to find his way, Doth tax his sight, but far doth stray.
Not work of man, nor sport of child Finds Nassan on this mazy wild; Lax grow his joints, limbs toil in vain— Poor wight!
At the beginning of each chapter, the alphabet appears along with a sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".
[27] In December 2009, a collective of crime writers, Criminal Brief, published eight days of articles as a Christmas-themed lipogrammatic exercise.
[28] In June 2013, finance author Alan Corey published "The Subversive Job Search",[29] a non-fiction lipogram that omitted the letter "Z".
[30] In the ninth episode of the ninth season of How I Met Your Mother, "Platonish", Lily and Robin challenge Barney to obtain a girl's phone number without using the letter E. A website called the Found Poetry Review asked each of its readers (as part of a larger series of challenges) to compose a poem avoiding all letters in the title of the newspaper that had already been selected.
In Turkey the tradition of "Lebdeğmez atışma" or "Dudak değmez aşık atışması" (literally: two troubadours throwing verses at each other where lips do not touch each other) that is still practiced,[32] a form of instantaneously improvised poetry sung by opposing Ashiks taking turns for artfully criticising each other with one verse at a time, usually by each placing a pin between their upper and lower lips so that the improvised song, accompanied by a Saz (played by the ashik himself), consists only of labial lipograms i.e. without words where lips must touch each other, effectively excluding the letters B, F, M, P and V from the text of the improvised songs.
The seventh- or eighth-century Dashakumaracharita by Daṇḍin includes a prominent lipogrammatic section at the beginning of the seventh chapter.
However, during the previous night of vigorous lovemaking, his lips have been nibbled several times by his beloved; as a result, they are now swollen, making it painful for him to close them.
Because files were shared and moved between computer platforms where the internal representation of the characters Å, Ä, Ö, å, ä, and ö (all moderately common vowels) were different, the tradition to write comments in source code without using those characters emerged.
The entire novel is written without the common word ஒரு (oru, "one", also used as the indefinite article), and there are no punctuation marks in the novel except dots.
[clarification needed] Russian 18th-century poet Gavriil Derzhavin avoided the harsh R sound (and the letter Р that represents it) in his poem "The Nightingale" to render the bird's singing.
[38] A reverse lipogram, also known as an antilipo[39] or transgram[40] is a type of constrained writing where each word must contain a particular letter in the text.