What is “alliteration” actually?

Question

I have come across contrasting definitions of alliteration in different dictionaries, grammars and on websites.

The website 'Literary Devices' (literarydevices.net) defines it as:

"It is a stylistic device in which a number of words, having the same first consonant sound, occur close together in a series... An important point to remember here is that alliteration does not depend on letters but on sounds. So the phrase not knotty is alliterative, but cigarette chase is not.

Merriam Webster Dictionary defines 'alliteration' and explains further as:

Definition of alliteration:

the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables (such as wild and woolly, threatening throngs)

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."

alliteration. (Fowler's Modern English Usage)

"The purposive use in a phrase or sentence of words beginning with or containing the same letter or sound. After life's fitful fever; In a summer season when soft was the sun. The much-quoted line of Charles Churchill Apt alliteration's artful aid is not as good an example of alliteration as it looks, since only the first two a's have the same value".

Fowler seems to accept the repetition of even Vowel letters/sounds as alliteration, when he says that the first two a's of "Apt alliteration's artful aid" have the same value.

Collins Dictionary defines 'alliterations' as:

"the use of the same consonant (consonantal alliteration) or of a vowel, not necessarily the same vowel (vocalic alliteration), at the beginning of each word or each stressed syllable in a line of verse, as in around the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran"

Having read all these contradicting definitions and being confused, I am tempted to ask what actually 'alliteration' is. Are there two types of alliterations as Collins Dictionary says - consonantal and vocalic alliterations?

Answer 1

Fowler is just plain wrong about using letters. Alliteration has to do with sounds only, not letters.

That said, it is true that most alliteration consists of repeating consonants (or more often consonant clusters). This is because there are far more words starting with consonants than with vowels, and far more still starting with consonant clusters than with single consonants.

It is possible to alliterate initial vowels, but it's rare in modern English, because in order to avoid being reduced to schwa, vowels have to be stressed, and most English words beginning with vowels are not stressed on the first syllable.

When vowel alliteration occurs, it is common to precede each alliterated stressed vowel with a glottal stop. German does this automatically for every vowel-initial word, which is part of what makes In Ulm, um Ulm, und um Ulm herum a tongue-twister in German.

Answer 2

Even though the term was coined (by Giovanni Pontano) in the 15th Century, alliteration was already used by ancient Greeks and Romans, in poetry as well as in plain speech.

Caesar's famous phrase

Veni, vidi, vici ("I came, I saw, I conquered")

is a good example.

Thanks to the repeated consonant, a phrase, or a series of phrases, becomes easy to remember, and, in some cases, forces itself upon your memory.

The parallel in music would be a single note played more than once in quick succession that makes the (musical) phrase instantly memorable (think the opening three notes of Beethoven's Symphony Number 5).

Advertising professionals are well aware of alliteration's utility when it comes to forcing something into people's heads (regardless of how folks may feel about it) and have been using the trick for over a century. Consider:

Coca Cola

Dunkin' Donuts

Bed, Bath & Beyond

Best Buy

In the English language at least, consonant alliteration is a great deal more common than vowel alliteration, even though the latter is occasionally used.

The repeating sound (or even a string of sounds) does not have to be the beginning sound of each word being used in alliteration, either. In his poem The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe uses the "ur" sound as follows:

And the silken sad uncertain
rustling of each purple curtain ...

... and reinforces the effect by rhyming the words containing the alliterating sound.

Answer 3

In French, alliteration can only use consonants, at least according to wikipédia.

In Old English poetry, all vowels alliterated with each other. For example, from Beowulf, we have the line

egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð

So it really depends on the context. If you want to define it so it applies to all languages, you need to allow vowels to alliterate.