Psychology Today | 26.10.2026 22:01
In the American television quiz show "Wheel of Fortune," a contestant must guess a consonant missing from the words in a puzzle phrase for each spin of the wheel. But the contestant must pay $250 dollars from an accumulated amount of money to see what vowels are in the puzzle. The rules of the game are actually based on a well-known principle in linguistics and information theory that can be defined—in reference to the game itself—as the principle that it is easier to figure out what a word is if given only its consonants, but almost impossible to do so if given just its vowels.
