What English words contain the vowel letters, a, e, i, o, and u, with fewest consonant letters?

Question

What English words contain the five vowel letters, a, e, i, o, and u, with fewest consonant letters?

Facetious and abstemious contain the five in alphabetical order, and each contains four consonant letters: fcts in facetious, and bstm in abstemious. There are two instances of s in the case of abstemious, but we are counting each letter once, so both words achieve a consonant score of four.

We are looking for the word or words that contain all five of these vowel letters, not necessarily in alphabetical order, and perhaps repeated, and that have the lowest consonant score.

(Note: please can nobody edit to change "vowel letter" and "consonant letter" to "vowel" and "consonant". "Vowels" and "consonants" are sounds - they are classes of phonemes, not classes of written letters. Often a vowel letter does not represent a vowel. I am also aware that y often does represent a vowel and that w sometimes does.)

Answer 1

Iouea (noun)

1. A taxonomic genus within the phylum Porifera — Cretaceous fossil sponges.

contains all five vowels, although it is a scientific word. As an alternative,

Eunoia (noun)

1. (rhetoric) Goodwill towards an audience, either perceived or real; the perception that the speaker has the audience's interest at heart.

contains all vowels and one consonant. This is also the shortest word to contain all vowels.

As a bit of trivia, Christopher Bök's Eunoia is an anthology of poems, where each chapter is written using words limited to a single vowel.

Answer 2

Here's a word I have just found in the Oxford English Dictionary that achieves a score of one:

mieaou

It's a variant spelling of

miaow.

Answer 3

This problem seems familiar (not from another PSE question) and I can remember two answers that came up with a score of:

2 consonants

which were:

Sequoia and miaoued

Note: the second was contentious to whether it was in fact a valid word, but the first definitely is.

Answer 4

Maybe this takes the fun out of the question, but it is a computational problem. I obtained the list of words only containing alphabetic characters here (words_alpha.txt): https://github.com/dwyl/english-words. First, find all uncapitalized words (avoiding proper names) that contain all the vowels:

 grep '^[a-z]' words_alpha.txt | grep a | grep e | grep i | grep o | grep u > tmp1

Then remove vowels and print the remaining length (number of consonants):

 sed 's/[aeiou]//g' tmp1 | awk '{print length($0)}' > tmp2

Finally, paste the counts next to the corresponding word, sort and take those with less than four consonants:

paste tmp2 tmp1 | sort -g | awk '$1 < 3'
2  aboideau
2  aboiteau
2  adoulie
2  cadiueio
2  eucosia
2  eulogia
2  eulogiae
2  eunomia
2  eutocia
2  eutopia
2  miaoued
2  moineau
2  sequoia

So in this list, no word has less than two consonants, while twelve words have exactly two consonants.

Answer 5

I found two words with 2 points (apart from sequoia):

aurevoir attenuation

Though the first one is bending the rules a bit :)

Answer 6

I mentioned CAESIOUS in a comment as having three consonant letters, but I had missed that the score is based on distinct consonant letters, so it scores 2 and is worthy of elevation to an answer. It has the additional nice property of having each of the vowel letters exactly once and in order.

SOWPODS contains a further 12 words scoring two, of which 8 have been listed in previous answers, and one (SEQUOIAS) is a simple plural of one which has. The three additions are

• DOULEIA (not exactly a word of quotidian usage, at least in the circles I move in)
• OSSUARIES (probably the two-pointer I use second most after ATTENUATION)
• AUTOCUTIE (which I've never heard before, but apparently does see some use)

For completeness, the other two-pointers in SOWPODS are

• ABOIDEAU
• ABOITEAU
• ATTENUATION
• EULOGIA(E)
• MIAOUED
• MOINEAU
• SEQUOIA