from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. Resemblance of sound, especially of the vowel sounds in words, as in: "that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea” ( William Butler Yeats).
- n. The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds, especially in stressed syllables, with changes in the intervening consonants, as in the phrase tilting at windmills.
- n. Rough similarity; approximate agreement.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. The repetition of similar or identical vowel sounds (though with different consonants), usually in literature or poetry.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. Resemblance of sound.
- n. A peculiar species of rhyme, in which the last accented vowel and those which follow it in one word correspond in sound with the vowels of another word, while the consonants of the two words are unlike in sound.
- n. Incomplete correspondence.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Resemblance of sounds.
- n. Specifically In prosody, a species of imperfect rime, or rather a substitute for rime, especially common in Spanish poetry, consisting in using the same vowel-sound with different consonants, and requiring the use of the same vowels in the assonant words from the last accented vowel to the end of the word: thus, man and hat, penitent and reticence, are examples of assonance in English.
- n. Agreement or harmony of things.
- n. Synonyms Paronomasia, etc. See pun.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- n. the repetition of similar vowels in the stressed syllables of successive words
When the initial letters are vowels, the gimmick is called assonance.
On "Irish Bulls" [VERBATIM II, 1, 1] and the German bull, by an odd coincidence of assonance, the German word for this linguistic extravagance is Verbalhornen.
The repetition of the same stressed vowel sounds with different consonants is called assonance: en Español
There is always an element of subjectivity in a judgement about alliteration as indeed also about other effects, such as assonance and rhyme.
But the two verbs nuach and nacham have a kind of assonance, they sound somewhat alike, and Lamech played upon this similarity in a perfectly permissible pun.
Assonance, in its stricter sense, means the repetition of an accented vowel (blackness -- dances), while the succeeding sounds vary, but the terms "assonance" and "consonance" are often employed loosely to signify harmonious effects of tone-color within a line or group of lines.
The kind of assonance avoided was identity of final sounded consonants in successive words, _e. g._, lane, vine.
He explains terms such as assonance and consonance through the lyrics of Keats and Eminem ...
There are other forms such as assonance (repeating vowel sounds such as boot, tune, fool) and consonance (repeating consonant sounds such as but, feet, knot) and meter (repeating stress patterns as we've discussed).
(They seem not to be linked by the three rarer types of sound-repetition known as assonance, preliteration, and consonance -- as in tid-bit, sad sack, or big lug.