In the American television quiz show "Wheel of Fortune," a contestant must guess a consonant missing from the words in a puzzle phrase for each spin of the wheel. But the contestant must pay $250 dollars from an accumulated amount of money to see what vowels are in the puzzle. The rules of the game are actually based on a well-known principle in linguistics and information theory that can be defined—in reference to the game itself—as the principle that it is easier to figure out what a word is if given only its consonants, but almost impossible to do so if given just its vowels.
Take, for example, the following word missing the vowels. What word is it if you are told that it refers to a sport?
T _ N N _ S
It is fairly easy to figure out that the word is TENNIS. Now, look at the following word, which is missing the consonants. It refers to someone who likes to go on trips.
_ _ A _ E _ E _
The answer is TRAVELER. Identifying the word this time is much more difficult for most of us because of this principle, called, technically, information entropy. Although it has a broader technical definition, in the case of such puzzles it allows us to understand concretely that consonants carry more information than vowels.
English has 21 letter consonants but only five (sometimes six) letter vowels. Because there are fewer vowels, they appear more frequently in word construction, offering very little in terms of information load, as the communications engineer Claude Shannon called it in his classic 1948 paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," in which he quantified how much information a message carries based on its unpredictability—the less predictable something is, the more information it carries. In this framework, consonants have high entropy (high information load), whereas vowels have low entropy (low information load). If the consonants are removed, a word becomes a mystery; if the vowels are removed, it is a fairly easy task to reconstruct it.
Vowels also have information value, as can be seen in those words that are made up only of vowels or are vowel-heavy, such as audio and queue. But these are rare.
At the purely phonetic level, vowels can be seen to have a “pronunciation-smoothing” function. If we try to pronounce a string of consonants, such as NXT (next) or BLDG (building), our mouth jams up. Without vowels, there is almost no continuous airflow. They allow the transition from consonant to consonant (or cluster of consonants) to flow smoothly. This function can also be assumed by liquid consonants (R and L), but, by and large, it falls upon the vowels to allow for unobstructed airflow to occur during speech.
In sum, consonants provide greater information about lexical identity than vowels do. In "Wheel of Fortune," the fact that vowels are highly predictable and appear in almost every word, giving them away for free would make the puzzles too easy to solve.
Example
In the puzzles here, you are given words missing the consonants, thus reversing the rules of "Wheel of Fortune." As in the game, however, you are given a clue as to its meaning:
Appliance:
_ E _ _ I _ E _ A _ O _
The answer is REFRIGERATOR. As you may have experienced, the effort to identify the word is rather substantial. As examples such as this imply, our brain seems to have a “consonant bias,” as posited by the information entropy principle. The clues used here are intentionally generic or tricky. This is meant to emphasize how difficult it is to identify words missing the consonants, especially in the absence of clues that do not zero in concretely on their meanings.
Puzzles
1. A place of higher education
U _ I _ E _ _ I _ _
2. A spice
_ I _ _ A _ O _
3. Handheld know-it-all
_ _ A _ _ _ _ O _ E
4. Colossal
_ I _ A _ I _
5. A monster
_ O _ _ I _ _ A
6. Contemporaneity
_ O _ E _ _ I _ _
7. Proof
_ E _ O _ _ _ _ A _ I O _
8. Dorothea Lange’s art
_ _ O _ O _ _ A _ _ _
9. Input provider
_ E _ _ O A _ _
10. Synthetic lookalike
_ E E _ _ A _ E
Answers
- University
- Cinnamon
- Smartphone
- Titanic
- Godzilla
- Modernity
- Demonstration
- Photography
- Keyboard
- Deepfake
References
C. E. Shannon, "A mathematical theory of communication," in The Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 379-423, July 1948, doi: 10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x.