assonance

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There is a surfeit of assonance -- _all, shore, shore, lord_;

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Definitions (9)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (3)

  1. noun Resemblance of sound, especially of the vowel sounds in words, as in: "that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea” (William Butler Yeats).
  2. noun The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds, especially in stressed syllables, with changes in the intervening consonants, as in the phrase tilting at windmills.
  3. noun Rough similarity; approximate agreement.

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Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (1)

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Examples (50)

  • In this unrhymed poem, assonance is very carefully avoided. —  Frederic Mistral
  • When I discover a bad assonance or a repetition in one of my phrases, I am sure that I am floundering in error; by dint of searching, I find the exact expression which was the only one and is, at the same time, the harmonious one. —  The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters
  • The employment of rhyme in place of assonance, and of the alexandrine in place of the decasyllabic line, encouraged what may be called poetical padding. —  A History of French Literature Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II.
  • In this place I will barely remark, that I have sometimes noticed in the unlanguaged prattlings of infants a fondness for alliteration, assonance, and even rhyme, in which natural predisposition we may trace the three degrees through which our Anglo-Saxon verse rose to its culmination in the poetry of Pope. —  The Biglow Papers
  • Not being able to preserve the assonance, I have dropped the greater part of his title 320] Bogodanny (_bog = God; dat'_, davat' = to give). —  Russian Fairy Tales A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore
 

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Etymologies (2)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. French, from Latin assonāre, to respond to : ad-, ad- + sonāre, to sound; see swen- in Indo-European roots.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. from French assonance (= Spanish asonancia = Portuguese assonancia), from assonant: see assonant, adjective
 

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/ˈæsənəns/
by American Heritage

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