string - Detecting Vowels vs Consonants In Python

What silly mistake am I making here that is preventing me from determining that the first letter of user input is a consonant? No matter what I enter, it allows evaluates that the first letter is a vowel.

original = raw_input('Enter a word:')
word = original.lower()
first = word[0]

if len(original) > 0 and original.isalpha():
    if first == "a" or "e" or "i" or "o" or "u":
        print "vowel"
    else:
        print "consonant"

else:
    print "empty"

Answer

Change:

if first == "a" or "e" or "i" or "o" or "u":

to:

if first in ('a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u'):  #or `if first in 'aeiou'`

first == "a" or "e" or "i" or "o" or "u" is always True because it is evaluated as

(first == "a") or ("e") or ("i") or ("o") or ("u"), as an non-empty string is always True so this gets evaluated to True.

>>> bool('e')
True