Missing Vowels shows one animal name with every vowel removed. An underscore marks each vowel the word lost.
"_L_PH_NT" is ELEPHANT. "K_NG_R__" is KANGAROO.
A run lasts three minutes. Name as many animals as you can in that time.
How to play
- Read the word in the middle of the screen. Each underscore is one vowel.
- Type the animal's name. The game accepts the name as soon as you spell it — you do not press Enter.
- A correct name scores one point and draws the next animal.
- Select Skip to draw the next animal. A skip costs no point, but it costs time.
- The clock starts on your first keystroke, so you can read the first word first.
- The bar under the header drains as the clock runs. It turns red for the last 20 seconds.
- The game saves your progress. You can close the page and continue within one hour.
- Select Review words on the result screen to see every word of the run and its answer.
What counts in this quiz
- The pool holds 200 well-known animals — mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, sea life and insects.
- Every animal is one word. "Polar bear" and "killer whale" are two words, so they are not in the pool.
- Two pairs share a pattern, so the pool makes 198 different puzzles. That is the highest score.
- Each run deals the puzzles in a random order, and no pattern repeats inside one run.
- Score is one point per animal named. Skipped animals score nothing.
- The leaderboard ranks the number of animals named in the three minutes.
What's not included — and why
- The five vowels are A, E, I, O and U. Y is a consonant here, so PYTHON shows as "PYTH_N".
- Only the exact spelling counts. The mask shows every consonant, so it tells you the letters the answer needs.
- Two animals can share one pattern. "B__R" is BEAR or BOAR, and "M__S_" is MOOSE or MOUSE.
- The game accepts both names for such a pattern, and it shows that pattern only once in a run.
- Capital letters do not matter. "elephant" and "ELEPHANT" both count.
Good to know
- Disemvowelling — writing a word without its vowels — is much older than the internet. Written Hebrew and Arabic still work this way.
- English readers manage it because consonants carry most of the information in a word.
- The longest word in the pool is HIPPOPOTAMUS, at 12 letters. The shortest have three letters: BAT, BEE, ANT, OWL, YAK and ELK.
- The hardest words are the ones with many vowels: KANGAROO shows as "K_NG_R__" and loses four letters of eight.