I’m about two-thirds of the way through Thurber: A Biography by Burton Bernstein. I had known that James Thurber was one of the finest American humorists of the 20th C., but I did not realize that he was very good at word games. Once, Peter De Vries and Berton Roueche challenged Thurber to come up with single words that contain all five vowels — “sequoia” was the example they gave him. Thurber: A Biography quotes from two of Thurber’s letters to De Vries and Roueche, in which he gives them twelve other such words. He extended the game to come up with five-vowel names of real people, such as Benjamin Clough.

I read too fast, and had already read Thurber’s twelve five-vowel words before I realized that it would have been far more fun to try to find them myself. Now I’m trying to think if there are any more beyond those twelve. I don’t want to spoil your fun, so I’ll just leave this question hanging:– how many five-vowel words can you come up with? — and how many five-vowel names (of real people)?