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What is alliteration?
In alliteration, consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables are repeated. The repeated sounds are usually the first, or initial, sounds—as in "seven sisters"—but repetition of sounds in non-initial stressed, or accented, syllables is also common: "appear and report." Alliteration is a common feature in poetry, but it is also found in songs and raps and speeches and other kinds of writing, as well as in frequently used phrases, such as "pretty as a picture" and "dead as a doornail."
Alliteration can in its simplest form reinforce one or two consonant sounds, as in this line from William Shakespeare's "Sonnet XII":
When I do count the clock that tells the time
A more complex pattern of alliteration can be created when consonants both at the beginning of words and at the beginning of stressed syllables within words are repeated, as in the following line from Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples":
The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's
As a poetic device, alliteration is often discussed with assonance, the repetition of stressed vowel sounds within two or more words with different end consonants, as in "stony" and "holy"; and consonance, the repetition of end or medial consonants, as in "stroke" and "luck."
Examples of alliteration in a Sentence
Maxine Kumin, "A Questionnaire," 1977,
in To Make a Prairie, 1979
More specifically, how are actual events deformed by the application to them of metaphor, rhetorical comparison, prose rhythm, assonance, alliteration, allusion, and sentence structures and connectives implying clear causality?
—Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory, 1975
Eddie Brown, San Diego Union-Tribune, 21 Feb. 2026
Hitchcock & Herrmann — the alliteration rolls off the tongue almost as agreeably as the collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann came to fruition in the 1950s and ’60s.
—Chris Willman, Variety, 12 Dec. 2025
Senior Harper Hargrove practiced alliteration against the backdrop of Jupiter as students adventured through space.
—Lina Ruiz, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 12 Nov. 2025
Rejecting the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities—meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance—and in so doing restores to Homer’s masterwork its archaic grandeur.
—Literary Hub, 10 Nov. 2025
See All Example Sentences for alliteration
Cite this Entry
“Alliteration.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alliteration. Accessed 27 Mar. 2026.
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alliteration
noun
