Lexicon Subtleties: Alliteration

Blog Entry #83

Let’s start with an easy one. Most of us have been taught alliteration in schools, and if you’re from an ICSE school that studied the Golden Lyre poetry book for grades 9 and 10, you are all too familiar with this concept. This element is used to create harmony and unity within a poem.

Sometimes, alliteration works with just two words (which is like the minimum for the condition to even be satisfied!) such as 'treasure trove'. It need not match the spelling, as long as the sounds are phonetically the same, such as 'fish' and 'physics' or 'nest' and 'know'. It’s basically not the repetition of letters, but the repetition of sounds. 

Alliteration is also called head rhyme. TIL that similar to alliteration, which is concerned with the beginning of the words sounding the same, consonance is the repetition at the end of words, while assonance takes the middle ground. I came across these under the topic of rhymes. It might also interest you to know that there are several types of rhymes, other than the repetitive kind, such as the three mentioned above. See the footnotes below for more information.

I enjoy using alliterations, and that’s the theme I’ve chosen for the title of each of my posts on book summaries. You can check them out here.

That’s all for today! 

Stay safe.

Footnotes:

Types of rhymes:

Masculine or Singular end rhyme: vowels and succeeding consonant sounds are the same at the end and the emphasis is on the final stressed syllable

E.g. pan-tan, sing-thing

Feminine rhyme: the correspondence of sounds in two or more consecutive syllables

E.g. flower-power, lighting-fighting, habit-rabbit

Sight (or eye) rhyme: imperfect pattern that uses words similar in spelling rather than sound

E.g. dove-move, cry-envy, tone-gone

Slant (or para) rhyme: inexact or distant rhyme scheme where the sound matches but inconsistently

E.g. live-leaf, mill-mall

Homonym rhyme: word rhymes with its homonym 

E.g. blue-blew, bear-bare

Echo rhyme: same syllable endings utilized

E.g. appease-ease

Identity rhyme: whole word repeated

E.g. trip-trip

Repeat rhyme: whole line is repeated

A few other unique types are off-centered rhyme, mirror rhyme, sporadic rhyme, thorn rhyme, and last but not least: No-rhyme rhyme. This occurs when there are no words in the English language that match a particular word to rhyme it, such as purple and orange. The poet can still try to rhyme orange with door hinge or create neologisms like burple, the colour of a happy burp (LOL), to rhyme with purple.