Alliteration
stylistic literary device identified by the repeated sound of the first letter in a series of multiple words, or the repetition of the same letter sounds in stressed syllables of a phrase
Alliteration is the repetition of syllable-initial consonant sounds between nearby words, or of syllable-initial vowels if the syllables in question do not start with a consonant. It is often used as a literary device. A common example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers".
Historical use
The word alliteration derives from the Latin word littera, meaning "letter of the alphabet". It was first coined in a Latin dialogue by the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano in the 15th century. Pontano, however, used the term in a broader sense to include examples where the repeated letter does not start a word or a stressed syllable, e.g. ex áere rigéntem.
Alliteration is used in the alliterative verse of Old English poems like Beowulf, Middle English poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Old Norse works like the Poetic Edda, and in Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old Irish. It was also used as an ornament to suggest connections between ideas in classical Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit poetry.
Today, alliteration is used poetically in various languages around the world, including German, Welsh, Mongolian, Hungarian, American Sign Language, Somali, Finnish, and Icelandic.
The public source identifies “Alliteration” as stylistic literary device identified by the repeated sound of the first letter in a series of multiple words, or the repetition of the same letter sounds in stressed syllables of a phrase. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Alliteration, stylistic and literary.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q484495. The Library of Congress control number is sh85003695. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alliteration” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.