19:05
The word eunoia, which literally means beautiful thinking, is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Eunoia is a five-chapter book by Christian Bök in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram (the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter only E, etc.). Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (Bök actually retells the entire Iliad in Chapter E; you have to read it to believe it).It’s interesting to see just how far language can be stretched without breaking; in this case, by only using one vowel per chapter (but 98% of the available vocabulary). The entire book Eunoia is available to read free at the link, and it’s well worth clicking around even though I doubt that most people read the whole thing.
