Alliteration

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /əˌlɪtəˈɹeɪʃən/

Definitions

  1. A stylistic element in writing that features the recurrence of the same consonant sound at the beginning of closely associated words or phrases
  2. A literary technique where successive words or phrases begin with the same consonant sound, enhancing musicality and emphasis
  3. A technique in poetry and prose that emphasizes sound through the repetition of initial consonant sounds in a series of words or phrases

Etymology: For centuries before anyone named it, English poetry ran on it. The poet of "Beowulf" built every line around repeated opening sounds rather than rhyme, and the habit outlived the Norman Conquest, flowering again in the fourteenth century in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "Piers Plowman." Yet the name for the device was not coined until around 1500, and not in England at all. Its inventor was Giovanni Pontano, the humanist who led the literary academy at Naples. In a dialogue called "Actius," written in the 1490s and published in 1507, after his death in 1503, he needed a label for the chiming initial sounds he admired in Virgil. He built one from Latin "ad" ("to, towards") and "littera" ("a letter"), producing "alliteratio," roughly "the lettering-together." The Romans had used the effect freely, but classical Latin had no word for it. This one is New Latin, a Renaissance scholar's coinage from ancient parts. English writers had long described the technique in the same terms, by the letter. Chaucer's Parson, refusing to tell a tale in the northern style, protests that he is "a Southren man" who cannot "geeste 'rum, ram, ruf,' by lettre." Two centuries later Shakespeare's pedant Holofernes in "Love's Labour's Lost" vows to "affect the letter, for it argues facility." The amateur actors of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" murder the effect with "with blade, with bloody blameful blade, / He bravely broach'd his boiling bloody breast." Pontano's term crossed into English by the 1650s and settled in. Despite its root, alliteration is about sound, not spelling. "Cat" and "kite" alliterate; "phone" and "pear," which share no opening sound, do not, and neither do "knight" and "kettle."

Synonyms: repetition, consonance