A lipogram literally means “lacking a letter.” In a narrow sense, a lipogram is a piece of writing that excludes one or more letters.
But pieces of writing do that all the time! A lot of my posts to this site have been written without the letter q, or z, or x…sometimes without all three. Standard-sized crossword grids are more notable when they include all twenty-six letters than when they don’t. (We call those pangrams, and I’ll get into that more with another section.) So a lipogram is only worth calling a lipogram when its exclusions are unusual.
A lot of the ambitious lipograms go after “e.” It’s the most common letter in English, so working without it is more impressive than any other single omission. Two famous full-length lipogram novels, Gatsby and A Void, are both e-less.
This poses a lot of challenges. Without “e,” you can’t use the most common word, “the.” You also have pronoun trouble—you and I and it are fine, but he, she, they, and even one are all off the table. The past tense is hard to render too, since no -ed words are allowed. You have access to was but not were, had but not have had, did but not done. There is no there, or here, or where.
I knew fairly early on that I wanted to make the Ubercross Abecedaria E into some kind of e-related lipogram. But figuring out what kind took some trial and error.