Consonance
Repeated consonant sounds within or at the end of nearby words.
Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in close proximity, most often at the ends or in the middles of words rather than at their beginnings — 'pitter patter', 'struts and frets'. When the repeated consonant is specifically the first sound of stressed syllables, we call it alliteration; consonance is the broader family that alliteration belongs to.
A specialised form, half rhyme or slant rhyme, uses final-consonant agreement with different vowels ('groined / groaned', 'hall / hell'). Wilfred Owen built Strange Meeting almost entirely on it, and the effect is a rhyme that refuses to resolve — appropriate to the subject.
In prose, consonance is the quiet reason some sentences feel weighted. Hard stops (/k/, /t/, /p/) repeated across a clause make it terse and percussive; repeated sibilants and liquids (/s/, /l/, /m/) make it fluid. Writers of aphorisms exploit this constantly, because a line that sounds inevitable is read as though it were true.
Common mistake: overloading a sentence until the pattern becomes audible as a pattern. Consonance should be felt, not noticed; once a reader starts counting the /k/ sounds, they have stopped reading the argument.
“And all the air a solemn stillness holds.”
Keep reading the glossary
Repeated vowel sounds in nearby words, binding a phrase together without rhyming it.
The repetition of an initial consonant sound across nearby words.
A rhetorical scheme in which successive clauses have the same length and grammatical structure.
The immediate repetition of a word for emotional emphasis, without any intervening word.