Word for Wednesday: Eunoia

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This week’s Word for Wednesday concerns a rather rare word in the English language: namely, the shortest word to use all 5 vowels.

The word eunoia comes from a Greek word meaning: ‘beautiful thinking’. As such, in medicine, eunoia is occasionally used to describe the state of normal mental health.

In his exceptionally clever book entitled ‘Eunoia’, Canadian poet Christian Bok uses exclusively one vowel per chapter and as you’d expect, the book took him a while to write - 7 years in fact!. Aristotle, in his work 'Nichomechean Ethics', describes eunioa as one of the basic requirements for a happy life – here eunoia is synonymous with benevolence.

There are many other words that contain all the vowels – can you name some of them? A clue to get you started: sea-sponges…

Hugh MacDermott


17 Jun 2015
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One of the students has put in a huge amount of effort in completing Spellzone at least 3 times a week since his arrival with us in January. Looking at his scores after the latest GL testing, his standardised score has risen from 99 to 131. This is a truly phenomenal result. I just wanted to share the best result I have ever seen.

Terrie Penrose-Toms, Casterton College

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