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Alliteration is the repeated occurrence of the same consonant sound at the beginning of several words in the same phrase. An example is the Mother Goose tongue-twister, "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers …". usually used as a form of figurative language The term is sometimes applied in a more general way to the repetition of any sound, whether a vowel (assonance) or a consonant (consonance), in any positions within the words, as in "Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii" [2]. Alliteration may also include the use of different consonants with similar properties (labials, dentals, etc.) [3] or even the unwritten glottal stop that precedes virtually every word-initial vowel in the English language, as in the phrase "Apt alliteration's artful aid" (despite the unique pronunciation of the "a" in each word) [4]. Alliteration is a common literary or rhetorical device in all languages, although its accidental occurrence is often viewed as a defect. Alliterative verse was an important ingredient of poetry in Old English and other old Germanic languages such as Old High German, Old Norse, and Old Saxon. The relative formal accessibility of alliteration makes it one of the most commonly used literary tools in English, tracing its origins back to Old English and its ancestral languages. Old Germanic poetry was mostly in the form of alliterative verse, that relies heavily on consonance and assonance rather than rhyme. Perhaps the most famous example of Old English alliterative poetry is this passage from the epic Beowulf "Gan under Gyldnum Beage, þær þa godan twegen".[5]. It still seems to maintain an important, though perhaps more subtle, part in modern English poetry.
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