Talk:Assonance

Merge from Vowel harmony (poetry)
A new article; essentially the same subject. Staszek Lem (talk) 03:19, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

I agree, they're practically the same thing.

Commodorelm (talk) 13:07, 3 November 2017 (UTC)


 * The Vowel harmony (poetry) articl is on the same subject, but less well written. It should be purged, merged, or somehow deleted as a separate article.Pete unseth (talk) 23:05, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
 * ✅ Klbrain (talk) 06:41, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

Definition of assonance
Chambers 21st Century Dictionary (1996) gives a different definition of assonance, namely: "a resemblance in the sounds of words or syllables, either between their vowels (e.g. meat, bean) or between their consonants (e.g. keep, cape)". Other dictionaries give similar definitions. For example, if you Google "define assonance" you get: "resemblance of sound between syllables of nearby words, arising particularly from the rhyming of two or more stressed vowels, but not consonants (e.g. sonnet, porridge ), but also from the use of identical consonants with different vowels (e.g. killed, cold, culled )." I think this article should cover both meanings, not just the first. Kanjuzi (talk) 08:14, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Galloway quotation
The issue concerns the following quotation given as an example of assonance in prose: "Senator, in everything I said about Iraq I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong". An editor has deleted this with the comment "marginal at best". Could we have a second opinion from other editors please? It seems a very obvious case of assonance, first of all because these words are the key words of the antithesis and therefore emphasised; secondly because the first two have the bright wide open vowel [ɐi] and the second two have the dark, lip-rounded, very similar vowels [ʉ] and [ɔ]. When you hear the speech on YouTube (about minute 22 of this film: ) the assonance stands out clearly. Contrast this with the example which previously stood here: "an anxiety which almost amounted to agony" (Mary Shelley). There may be assonance between the two main words "anxiety" and "agony" (even though one vowel is stressed and the other not), but to include the unemphatic "an" and the unstressed vowel of "amounted" seems improbable. Kanjuzi (talk) 04:13, 9 January 2018 (UTC)


 * A point on the Shelley quotation: sometimes poets use alliteration of the eye that may not be as truly alliteration in the ear. Pete unseth (talk) 15:37, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
 * True, but this is a prose quotation, so perhaps it doesn't count. I think as a rule, in English, assonance applies mainly to stressed syllables just as rhyme does, isn't that right? Kanjuzi (talk) 15:44, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

British vs American usage
O.E.D. does not note a difference between British and American English use of 'assonance', as implied by the opening section (of both assonance and consonance, only the latter actually differing in usage). "Prosody. The correspondence or rhyming of one word with another in the accented vowel and those which follow, but not in the consonants, as used in the versification of Old French, Spanish, Celtic, and other languages."

Cf. "Correspondence of sounds in words or syllables; recurrence of the same or like sounds, e.g. in a verse; = 1."

"Resemblance or correspondence of sound between two words or syllables."

192.17.149.4 (talk) 22:59, 13 July 2019 (UTC)


 * @192.17.149.4 {*#}
 * Adamae Love (talk) 03:33, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Adamae Love (talk) 03:36, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
 * atomic clock synchronized Adamae Love (talk) 03:37, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Adamae Love (talk) 03:36, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
 * atomic clock synchronized Adamae Love (talk) 03:37, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Is there a word for the opposite of assonance?
I just read a snippet from Calvert Watkins where he noted the artistry of Hesiod in using so many different vowels in a passage about singers. Is there a term that is the opposite of assonance, the use of many different vowels? Pete unseth (talk) 15:28, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I found that the word "dissonance" is used to convey the opposite of assonance. This is the answer I sought. Should this be reflected in the article? Pete unseth (talk) 16:10, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

fog and dog or history and mystery.
fog and dog or history and mystery. For me the first two don't rhyme but the last two rhyme. So you need to add more detail to the discussion. Jidanni (talk) 00:40, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Are you saying that "fog" and "dog" do not rhyme? I am curious as to how you would pronounce those two words. Kotterdale99 (talk) 15:30, 10 October 2021 (UTC)