All Vowel Place Names

I come across various language trivia lists on the Intertubes all the time. They cover a thousand different topics but some of them focus on words of unnatural length composed solely of vowels. It doesn’t take much to entertain me but you already knew that. They’re somewhat amusing but they do tend to stretch towards the bizarre. Many of the more remarkable words rarely appear in normal conversations. They may qualify from a technical sense but they feel a bit dubious to me. Others are proper names including various geographic locations, and of course those are the ones that interest me.

The lists all seem to steal liberally from each other. They blatantly parrot and plagiarize. It’s impossible to uncover the original source. However, I’ve not seen anyone attempt to confirm and map the alleged geographic locations so perhaps I can add some value to this pursuit. I found some of the locations but others were too obscure, assuming they actually exist, and I couldn’t locate them in any of the standard online mapping services.

Here are the locations I could find.


Aiea, Hawaii, USA

Aiea Loop Trail. Photo by John McKenzie; (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Aiea Loop Trail

Well, Aiea is one of the best all-vowel examples. It’s a four-vowel tongue twister. I’m not sure I’d call it a “town” per se — the government calls it a census-designated place — rather it’s more properly a suburb of Honolulu, Hawaii. Nine thousand people live here so it’s definitely a legitimate geographic location though.

The name has been passed down from one of the original Hawaiian land divisions (or Ahupua’a) dating back to the Hawaiian monarchy. Take a close look at a map and notice a number of places bearing the Aiea name: high school; middle school; athletic field; shopping center; trail, street and so on. This is definitely one of the crown jewels of all-vowel locations.


Eiao, Marquesas Islands

Anaho Bay. Photo by Behan; (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Marquesas Islands

Eiao isn’t part of Old McDonald’s Farm but a major northwestern island of the Marquesas. It had an indigenous Polynesian population in ancient times. It later served briefly as a leper colony in the 19th Century. The French military also occupied Eiao as they explored possible nuclear testing sites in the 1970’s. Today, however, much of the island has been overrun and overgrazed by feral sheep and no humans live here. France hopes to return the island to its original ecosystem and they’ve created the Eiao Island Nature Reserve.

View the Terrain option on the map and notice the elevated ridge that runs the length of the island. Eiao rises abruptly from the sea to an elevation of 576 meters (1,890 feet).


Lesser Examples

I confirmed other all-vowel geographic locations of shorter length.

  • Å. Reputedly there are a number of towns that go by the single letter, Å. I found two in Norway: Å i Tranøy (map) and Å i Lofoten (map). In both of these instances, “i” means “in” so Å i Tranøy means the town of Å in Tranøy. They add this qualifier so people know which Å is being referenced. There’s supposed to be an Å in Sweden too but I couldn’t locate it.
  • Ea (map) is a town in Basque area of Spain.
  • Ii (map) is located in Finland.

Flip the Script

I also found a polar opposite. For your enjoyment, here is Llwchwr, the Anti-Vowel Community.

Llwchwr is a community in Wales. I think just about anyone who might glance upon that strange string of consonants would probably guess the same. It’s found on the western edge of Swansea, and is comprised composed of Loughor and Kingsbridge. I love those twisted Welsh words.


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13 responses to “All Vowel Place Names”

  1. Lost Owl Avatar

    Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania has the town of Aitch. It’s not all vowels or consonants, but it is pronounced as a single letter: H. Around here, if you tell someone to “Go to H,” they wind up near Lake Raystown.

    1. Lost Owl Avatar

      Correction: They will wind up in Lake Raystown. The town was flooded when the dam was built.

      http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cgarner/html/aitch__pa.html

  2. James D Avatar
    James D

    Welsh words are of course spelt in the Welsh alphabet, in which W is a vowel. So Llwchwr is a five-letter word with two vowels. And thanks to Welsh orthography being so eminently sensible, it gives you some idea of how to pronounce the twisted anglicization “Loughor”.

  3. Craig Avatar
    Craig

    Well, it’s worth noting that Loughor and Llwchwr are both derived from the Latin Leucarum. The Welsh ‘w’ is vocalic representing both sounds of the English ‘oo’.

  4. wangi Avatar

    Pedantic hat on – your Welsh town has vowels if you treat the name as being in the Welsh language.

  5. Twelve Mile Circle Avatar

    Indeed, all of you are absolutely correct with respect to the Welsh alphabet and vowels… a poor attempt at humo(u)r on my part. 🙂

  6. Anton Sherwood Avatar

    Also, “comprised of”? The whole comprises its parts; the whole is composed of its parts. The two comp*se words are reciprocal, not synonyms. Nyah nyah.

    I think å (archaic spelling: aa) means ‘island’.

    1. Twelve Mile Circle Avatar

      True enough. The editor has been sacked.

  7. JHR Avatar

    Do you have any interest in German football? Look at the Bundesliga2 table. Notice FC Erzgebirge Aue ?

    As Wikipedia says: “Aue is a small town in Germany at the outlet of the river Schwarzwasser into the river Mulde in the Ore Mountains, and has roughly 18,000 inhabitants. Aue was the administrative seat of the former district of Aue-Schwarzenberg in Saxony, and is part of the Erzgebirgskreis since August 2008. It belongs to the Silberberg Town League.”

    It also has an over-achieving team who are threatening to spoils my team’s (Hertha BSC) season.

  8. Ian Dunbar Avatar
    Ian Dunbar

    I remember coming into the station in Trieste. Underneath “Trieste” in Italian was it’s Serbo-Croat (or perhaps Slovene) name “Trst”. Those South Slavs have got something against vowels.

  9. Fred Long Avatar

    Aloha, I posted the answer below to the question “What city has only vowels in its name?” on answers.com

    Aiea, Hawaii was the short answer given previous to my input. This answer is somewhat right. The name of the ‘Aiea in the Hawaiian language is a 5 letter word. Its spelling begins with the letter called an ‘okina. As strange as it may seem the ‘okina, which is represented in writing as an inverted apostrophe, is a full-fledged Hawaiian consonant. You can spell ‘Aiea as Aiea without the ‘okina, but now it is an anglicized version of a Hawaiian word and to that extent it is a legitimate spelling, however it is no longer a correctly spelled Hawaiian word. For purpose of the US Federal Government, they probably exclude the ‘okina (and kahako) used in Hawaiian spelling.

    -Fred

    Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_city_has_only_vowels_in_its_name#ixzz1EtZGiZWV

  10. Wyatt Mock Avatar
    Wyatt Mock

    Aiea actually has an okina in it which actually counts as a consenant in the Hawaiian alphabet

  11. matt Avatar
    matt

    Raised in Aiea and I had no idea it started with an okina!

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