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What is the longest sentence that uses each vowel only once?

Rules:

  • Any number of consonants can be used.
  • The letters: A, E, I, O, and U appear exactly once.
  • Y is considered a vowel, and as such, can only appear once.
  • All words must be English words in the Sowpods Scrabble dictionary and/or Merriam-Webster and must contain at least one vowel.

Example sentence:

Which word uses rhythm charms?

The letters A, E, I, O, U, and Y each appear exactly one time. This sentence is short, though (only 25 letters).

What is the longest sentence fitting these rules that can be made?

Note: Sentences do not have to be meaningful (they can just be a random string of words together). If you can come up with a long, meaningful sentence, that's even better!

Hint:

The longest I could find is 44 letters. Can you match (or possibly beat) that?

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    $\begingroup$ Upper bound of 6 words I guess! $\endgroup$
    – JMP
    Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 14:43
  • $\begingroup$ What counts as an English word? What counts as a sentence? Without explicitly defining both of those, this question is unfortunately subjective. $\endgroup$
    – Deusovi ♦
    Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 14:44
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    $\begingroup$ The shortest is perhaps 'Your idea!' $\endgroup$
    – JMP
    Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 14:45
  • $\begingroup$ @Deusovi Normally, an English word is one found in a dictionary. As explained already in the note, any words can be put together to form a sentence. $\endgroup$
    – DenverCoder1
    Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 14:54
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    $\begingroup$ There are many different dictionaries -- you should specify which dictionary is to be used. (For instance, many dictionaries include "CWM" and "CRWTH"; these have no vowels and could therefore be repeated an infinite number of times.) It is also vague when Y counts as a vowel; English letter-sound correspondence is not always one-to-one, and so "which sound a letter makes" is not a well-defined concept. $\endgroup$
    – Deusovi ♦
    Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 14:59

2 Answers 2

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41 letters:

Rhythms, strengths: mustn't splotch latchstrings!

If the sentence really doesn't have to make any kind of sense, then we can just

use some of the longest single-vowel words

to get 45 letters:

Schnapps's strengths: mightn't splotch, mustn't (rhythms).

With some help from this list as well as our friends at English SE.

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    $\begingroup$ You are right, after creating the question, I realized that one could easily find the best answer by simply finding the longest words with only one vowel. A list of words and a regex such as ^[^aeiouy]*a[^aeiouyy]*$ can achieve that (this one is for words with a). $\endgroup$
    – DenverCoder1
    Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 15:42
  • $\begingroup$ Words with multiple vowels are allowed, but most likely would not be optimal given that you have fewer chains of consonants. $\endgroup$
    – DenverCoder1
    Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 15:43
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    $\begingroup$ @eyl327 Of course, some of these words actually have more than one vowel - maybe depending on accent - since a vowel is a type of phoneme, not a type of letter. That's why the whole "is Y a vowel or a consonant" debate doesn't actually make sense: the answer is it's neither, it's a letter which may represent either a vowel or a consonant in different words. $\endgroup$
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 15:59
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According to Qat, here are the longest words with a single vowel:

SCHMALTZ STRENGTHS SCHTICKS BORSCHTS SCHMUCKS RHYTHMS

giving a score of

48.

These words are all in M-W; this is likely optimal. (Because of English syllable restrictions, it is very unlikely that including two vowels in the same word will increase the total number of letters you can get.)

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for including that link! It could be useful for doing quick lookups. $\endgroup$
    – DenverCoder1
    Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 16:11

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