A consonant remover keeps only the vowels in a piece of text and discards every consonant. It is the mirror image of a vowel remover and is useful for word games, phonetic experiments, and showing how little structure remains when only vowels survive.
How it works
The tool inspects each character and decides whether it is a cased letter by comparing its uppercase and lowercase forms. If it is a letter, it is kept only when it is a vowel:
vowels = "aeiou" (or "aeiouy" if y is treated as a vowel)
for each char:
if char is a letter:
keep only if char.toLowerCase() is in vowels
else:
keep it (space, digit, punctuation)Non-letters always survive, so word spacing and punctuation are preserved while the consonant skeleton disappears.
Worked examples
| Input | Y as vowel? | Output |
|---|---|---|
| The quick brown fox | No | e ui o o |
| Why is this cryptic | No | i i i |
| Why is this cryptic | Yes | y i i i |
| Mississippi | No | iiii |
| AEIOU and sometimes Y | Yes | AEIOU a oeiey |
Notice that only cased letters are stripped — digits and punctuation stay put. Room 101! becomes oo 101!.
The Y problem
The question of whether Y is a vowel divides grammarians and phoneticians. In standard English, Y functions as a vowel whenever it carries the sound of I or E (as in “gym,” “sky,” “happy”). As a consonant it carries the /j/ sound (as in “yes,” “yellow”). Because this distinction depends on position and pronunciation — not on the character itself — the tool gives you the choice. Leaving Y as a consonant (the default) is safer for most text; enabling it as a vowel is better for phonological analysis of English text where Y is rarely consonantal.
What this is useful for
Word games and puzzles. Abjads (writing systems like Arabic and Hebrew) write primarily consonants and leave vowels implied. Running a phrase through a consonant remover shows what survives when vowels alone carry the message — a useful exercise for understanding how human readers reconstruct meaning from partial information.
Phonetics exploration. Vowel-only strings reveal the syllable count and vowel pattern of a phrase without the consonant skeleton. Words like Mississippi become iiii — immediately showing its four-syllable, I-dominant structure.
Text art and aesthetics. Some artists and designers use vowel-only strings in typographic work, where the flowing shapes of A, E, I, O, U contrast with the angularity of consonants.
Mirror test with the vowel remover. Pair this tool with the vowel remover to split any text into its two complementary halves. The two outputs together contain every letter of the original, partitioned cleanly with no overlap — except for Y if you set it differently in each tool.