Words With All Five Vowels (and Words With Them in Order)

Some words manage to fit all five vowels, A, E, I, O and U, into a single spelling. They're called supervocalic words, and they're a favourite of trivia books and puzzle setters. We searched our 275,000-word dictionary and found 4,002 of them. That sounds like a lot, but most are long and technical. The interesting ones are the shortest, the most familiar, and the handful that contain the vowels in perfect order.

The shortest words with all five vowels

With only five vowels needed, the theoretical minimum would be a five-letter word made entirely of vowels. English doesn't have one, so the shortest supervocalic words in our dictionary have seven letters:

SEQUOIA is the famous one: it uses all five vowels plus just two consonants, S and Q. That makes it a perfect vowel dump in word games, if you hold the Q.

Common words with all five vowels

You don't have to go hunting for rare words. These everyday words all contain A, E, I, O and U:

Notice how many end in -TION. The suffix -TION contributes I and O, which leaves only A, E and U for the rest of the word. That's why words like EQUATION, EDUCATION and REGULATION are supervocalic so often.

Vowels in alphabetical order

Rarer still are words where A, E, I, O and U appear in order, each exactly once. Our dictionary has just a handful:

• ABSTEMIOUS: moderate in eating and drinking.
• FACETIOUS: treating serious things with inappropriate humour.
• ARSENIOUS: containing arsenic.
• CAESIOUS: bluish or greenish grey (a botanical term).
• ABSTENTIOUS: self-restraining.
• PARECIOUS: a botanical term for a type of plant reproduction.

Add -LY and you get FACETIOUSLY and ABSTEMIOUSLY, which contain the vowels in order followed by Y, so they include A, E, I, O, U and Y in order. These are the classic trivia answers.

The most vowel-heavy words

At the other extreme are words made almost entirely of vowels:

• QUEUE: five letters, four of them vowels. It keeps the same sound even if you remove the last four letters.
• EUOUAE: a six-letter word from medieval music, made entirely of vowels. It's made of the vowels of "seculorum Amen" and was written under chant melodies as a shorthand. It's in the Collins Scrabble list.
• OUIJA: four vowels in five letters.
• MIAOU: a spelling of "meow," with four vowels.
• ZOAEA and ZOOEAE: forms of a word for a crab larva.

Why this matters in word games

Holding too many vowels is a common Scrabble problem. Most supervocalic words are too long to play from a rack, but the vowel-heavy ones can save a turn:

• EUOUAE clears six vowels (needs E, U, O, U, A, E, so it's rare to hold exactly that).
• QUEUE clears four vowels with just one Q.
• OUIJA clears four vowels and plays the J for 8 points.
• SEQUOIA is a seven-letter play using all five vowels plus S and Q, earning a bingo bonus if you can fit it.

Short vowel dumps are more practical day-to-day: two-letter words like AA, AE, AI, EA, OE, OI and three-letter words like EAU are listed in our two-letter and three-letter guides.

How we counted

We searched every word in our dictionary for words containing at least one each of A, E, I, O and U. We counted Y as a consonant. For the "in order" list, we required each vowel to appear exactly once and in alphabetical sequence.

Explore further

Try the word finder with "contains" set to a few vowels to discover more. Or type a vowel-heavy rack into the unscrambler to see what you can play.

Related reading

• Words with no vowels
• Palindrome words
• Spelling Bee strategy