Someone at a blog--http://www.thelookmachine.com/archives/2005/10/sometimes_y_and.html--asked the same question, and, for whatever it's worth,  they came up with two obscure words derived from Welsh:
 
"'Cwm' -- a mountaineering term, pronounced like "room" but with a "k." It's basically a basin like edge of a valley, much like a cirque. ...And "Crwth" - which means, roughly, 'crowd.'"
 
A commenter on the blog then mentioned the word "pwned," which apparently derives from a typo of "owned" (used to mean "badly defeated") in the "World of Warcraft" computer game.But I don't suppose this is what your student's grade school teachers had in mind.
 
Brian

________________________________

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Veit, Richard
Sent: Mon 11/17/2008 5:32 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: "...and sometimes w"



 

 

 

A student asked me a question that I couldn't immediately answer. In grade school he learned the adage that "the vowels are the letters a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y and sometimes w." He was fine with y, which occurs as the lone vowel in syllables in words such as by, psych, hysteria, and silly. But what about w? Are there any English words in which w is the sole vowel in a syllable? Or does this adage merely refer to the use of w in combination with other vowels, such as in words like growth, flaw, and few? 

________________________________

Richard Veit
Department of English
University of North Carolina Wilmington

 

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