Other forms: vowels
A vowel is one of the letters a, e, i, o and u. The sounds you make with the mouth open and nothing in the way.
Y sits awkwardly and behaves as a vowel in words like rhythm and myth. English has five vowel letters and around twenty vowel sounds, which is most of the reason its spelling is so difficult. Every English syllable needs one. The opposite is a consonant, where the air is blocked somewhere. Speech uses long and short vowels, and the difference between ship and sheep is entirely one of them.
1nounvowelA speech sound made with an open vocal tract, or the letter representing it.
“There is only one vowel in the whole word.”
Proto-Indo-European
*wekʷ-
Latin
vōcālis — voiced
Old French
vouel
Middle English
vowel
English, today
vowel
From Middle English vowel, from Old French vouel, a variant of voyeul (whence French voyelle), from Latin vōcālis (“voiced”), itself a semantic loan of grc-koi φωνῆεν. a doublet of vocal and vocalis.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA