Assonance

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the "oo" (ou/ue) sound is repeated within the sentence and is assonant.

Assonance is more a feature of verse than prose. It is used in (mainly modern) English-language poetry, and is particularly important in Old French, Spanish and Celtic languages.

The eponymous student of Willy Russell's Educating Rita described it as "getting the rhyme wrong".

• Hear the mellow wedding bells. — Edgar Allan Poe, "The Bells"
• And murmuring of innumerable bees - Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Princess VII.203
• The crumbling thunder of seas — Robert Louis Stevenson
• That solitude which suits abstruser musings - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Dead in da middle of little Italy, little did we know that we riddled some middle men who didn't do diddily." - Big Pun
• It's hot and it's monotonous. - Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George, It's Hot Up Here
• tunditur unda - Catullus 11
• The sound of the ground is a noun. - somewhere

Assonance can also be used in forming proverbs, often a form of short poetry. In the Oromo language of Ethiopia, note the use of a single vowel throughout the following proverb, an extreme form of assonance:

• kan mana baala, aʔlaa gaala (“A leaf at home, but a camel elsewhere"; somebody who has a big reputation among those who do not know him well.)

See also

• Alliterationcs:Asonance

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