Assonance, Alliteration, and Consonance
Alliteration:
Alliteration is a term that describes a literary stylistic device. Alliteration is the repetition of one or
more initial sounds, usually consonants, in words within a line. For example, “She sells sea-shells
down by the sea-short” or “Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers” are both alliterative phrases.
In the former, all the words start with the “s” sound, while in the later, the “p’s” take precedence.
Aside from tongue twisters, alliteration is also used in poems, song lyrics, and even store or brand
names. The following examples of alliteration should make things a bit more clear.
Examples of Alliteration:
Identify the alliteration in the following examples to test your skills:
1. Alice’s aunt ate apples and acorns around August
2. Becky’s beagle barked and bayed, becoming bothersome for Billy.
3. Carries cat clawed her couch, creating chaos.
4. Dan’s dog dove deep in the dam, drinking dirty water as he dove.
5. Eric’s eagle eats eggs, enjoying each episode of eating.
6. Fred’s friends fried Fritos for Friday’s food.
7. Garry’s giraffe gobbled gooseberry’s greedily, getting good at grabbing goodies.
8. Hannah’s home has heat hopefully.
9. Isaacs ice cream is interesting and Isaac is imbibing it.
10. Jesse’s jaguar is jumping and jiggling jauntily.
11. Kim’s kid’s kept kiting
12. Larry’s lizard likes leaping leopards
13. Mike’s microphone made much music
14. Nick’s nephew needed new notebooks now not never
15. Orson’s owl out-performed ostriches
16. Peter’s piglet pranced priggishly
17. Quincy’s quilters quit quilting quickly
18. Ralph’s reindeer rose rapidly and ran round the room
19. Sara’s seven sisters slept soundly in sand
20. Tim’s took tons of tools to make toys for tots.
21. Uncle Uris’ united union uses umbrella’s
22. Vivien’s very vixen-like and vexing
23. Walter walked wearily while wondering where Wally was
24. Xavier’s x-rayed his xylophone.
25. Yarvis yanked you at yoga, and Yvonne yelled.
26. Zachary zeroed in on zoo keeping.
In each of these examples, the alliteration occurs in the words that have the same sound. As you can
see, not every word must be alliterative. You can use prepositions, such as of and pronouns such as his
and still maintain the alliterative effect. Alliteration does not need to be an entire sentence. Any two
word phrase can be alliterative. Even some single words can be alliterative, if they have multiple
syllables which begin with the same consonant sound.
Consonance:
Consonance is the repetition of two or more consonant sounds within a line. Often the consonant
sounds come at the very end of the word, but they come in the middle as well. In the sample below,
note the repetition of the letter d in the first line and the repetition of the letter s in the 2nd line.
