Meaning of disemvowel | Babel Free

Definitions

To remove the vowels from, for example, for the purpose of expurgating offensive words.

humorous, sometimes, transitive

Equivalents

Examples

“By the way, what has become of the conspiracy of Brander Matthews et als to disemvowel the English language? Not that it matters.”

“The trick will be in usurping as many vowels as you can, thus disemvoweling the others, and the one with the most words when all or as many letters as possible are used up wins.”

“"What happened?" the Amigoid asked. / "D'nt knw," she said. "Jst wk p nd hrd y tw tlkng n thn, sddnly nd wtht wrnng, thr ws ths ns." / "What?" Robotech_Master asked. / "I think I know what happened," Lawrence said. "It must be part of the Silliness that's infecting the Author's Altiverse." / "S wht hppnd? / "You've been disemvoweled," the Amigoid informed her.”

“Edna [Dame Edna Everage] reveals that she will always outmuscle [Barry] Humphries, disemvowelling his name to reduce it to the interjection "Hmmph!"”

“Another swearing-curtailing device is to allow the taboo word but disenvowel it, so that fuck and cunt become "f-ck" and "c-nt."”

“If someone you've disemvowelled comes back and behaves, forgive and forget their earlier gaffes. You're acting in the service of civility, not abstract justice.”

“Back to our Internet trolling behavior, some comment board moderators have tried to control trolling by "disemvoweling," removing all the vowels from the offending comments of trolls. This punishing practice makes troll comments easier to detect and harder to read, and therefore, less likely to generate the kind of outraged response a troll finds rewarding. Disemvoweling punishes the troll and effectively has decreased the numbers of offensive comments and hijacked comment threads on many message boards.”

“Write a program that removes all vowels from a file ("disemvowels"). For example, Once upon a time! becomes nc pn tm!. Surprisingly often, the result is still readable; try it on your friends.”

CEFR level