lipogram

A written text from which a specific letter is absent throughout. The most ambitious example is the 50,000-word novel Gadsby (1939) by Ernest Vincent Wright (1872–1939) in which the letter e, normally the most frequent in English, does not appear; this is a serious novel intended to present a different picture of the US from The Great Gatsby (1925) by (Francis) Scott (Key) Fitzgerald (1896–1940). A more recent novel entitled A Void (1995), a translation by the Scottish writer Gilbert Adair (born 1944) of La Disparation (1969) by the French novelist Georges Perec (1936–82), also omits the letter e throughout. The accidental omission of letters or words from writing is called lipography or haplography. [From Greek leipein to omit + gramma a letter]