Alliteration

Alliteration is a stylistic literary device identified by the repeated sound of the first consonant in a series of multiple words, or the repetition of the same sounds of the same kinds of sounds at the beginning of words or in stressed syllables of a phrase. "Alliteration" from the Latin word “litera”, meaning “letters of the alphabet”, and the first known use of the word to refer to a literary device occurred around 1624. Alliteration narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to the poem's meter, are stressed, as in James Thomson's verse "Come…dragging the lazy languid Line along". Another example is, "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers".

Consonance (ex: As the wind will bend) is another 'phonetic agreement' akin to alliteration. It refers to the repetition of consonant sounds. Alliteration is a special case of consonance where the repeated consonant sound is at the stressed syllable. Alliteration may also include the use of different consonants with similar properties such as alliterating z with s, as does the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or as Anglo-Saxon (Old English) poets would alliterate hard/fricative g with soft g (the latter exemplified in some courses as the letter yogh - ȝ - pronounced like the y in yarrow or the j in Jotunheim); this is known as license.