2. A written work composed of words chosen so as to avoid the use of one or more specific alphabetic characters.
3. A composition from which the writer rejects all words that contain a certain letter or letters.
Writing a lipogram is a trivial task for uncommon letters like "z", "j", or "x"; but it is much more difficult for common letters like "e". Writing this way is impractical, as the author must omit many ordinary words, resulting in stilted-sounding text that can be difficult to understand. Well-written lipograms are rare.
An example of a lipogrammatic writing is the classical Odyssey of Tryphiodorus in which there was no "a" in the first book, no "b" in the second book, and so on.
Another example of a lipogram is the following sentence which is considered to be something of an achievement; since the letter "t" is the second most commonly used letter in English: "Brisk pigmy gnome hides pudgy black while brash demon group, grown plump hawky, wreck cabin, would lynch dusky scamp."
Still another example of a lipogram is the following: "Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth." This sentence does not use any of the letters: "a", "e", "i", and "u".