Vowel

All the letters in the alphabet denote either vowels or consonants. Vowels have no friction made when spoken. All words have vowels. In words like spy, sty, lynx, fly, etc. the vowel is a Y which can also be a consonant

There are only six letters used to write vowels in English. They stand for about 20 vowel sounds in most English accents,[1] so these letters are a source of ambiguity in pronunciation for learners. These letters are vowels: A, E, I, O, U (and sometimes Y)

The rest of the letters of the alphabet denote consonants:

Vowels and consonants are what makes up the actual sounds in a language. To say, however, that letters 'are' vowels is incorrect. Our English alphabet is a list of 26 symbols used to indicate in writing the sounds we are able to isolate from within the individual words we speak. These symbols we call letters, therefore, are written symbols and their association with the spoken sounds is completely conventional and has no scientific ground. For instance, the symbol used for the aspiration sound in English, 'h' and 'H', correspond to different sounds in other alphabetical conventions, notably 'H' in Modern Greek stands for the long vowel 'E'. It is the prestige of writing that causes us to equate the graphemes (= letters) with their sounds (phonemes), but this equation is arbitrary and incorrect. Writing is violence made upon language to constrict the beautiful lively sounds of the human languages into graphic symbols. The graphic symbols we call letters were originally invented (sometime around 850 BCE) to preserve information. Writing is a conventional practice, and the symbols we use are able to remind us of the sounds such symbols might point to only because we are all agreed on what sounds each letter might represent. Sound is concrete, empirical, and physical, whereas the graphemes used to represent linguistic sounds (phonemes) are arbitrary and abstract.