Abjads write consonants and leave most vowels to the reader, as Arabic and Hebrew traditionally do.

The longer version

Semitic words build meaning from a skeleton of consonants while vowels carry grammatical detail, so a script that records only the skeleton still tells a fluent reader most of what matters. Optional dots and dashes can be added above and below for children, poetry or scripture, where a wrong vowel would change the sense.

The Phoenician script that spread around the Mediterranean worked this way, and Greek later broke from it by giving vowels their own letters. That single change produced the alphabets used across Europe. Between the two sit the scripts of South Asia and Ethiopia, where every consonant carries an inherent vowel that extra marks modify.

Where this entry sits

This category gathers small surprises about the English language, from odd spelling rules to words that quietly hide their own history. Expect palindromes, punctuation oddities, borrowed terms, and the strange ways writing systems record spoken speech. The full list sits on the Words and Language page, where every entry is listed in order.