Homoioteleuton
Successive phrases or clauses ending with the same sound.
Homoioteleuton (Greek: 'like ending') is the repetition of similar sounds at the ends of neighbouring words, phrases or clauses. It is rhyme's prose cousin: not organised into verse lines, but producing the same effect of closure and pairing.
Classical rhetoric prized it as one of the Gorgianic figures, and it survives everywhere memorability matters — legal doublets, advertising, political slogans. 'No pain, no gain' works on homoioteleuton plus isocolon.
It should be distinguished from epistrophe, which repeats the same word at the ends of clauses. Homoioteleuton repeats the sound with different words, so the ear registers pattern without the eye registering repetition.
In textual scholarship the term names a copying error: a scribe's eye jumps from one similar ending to the next and omits everything between. Editors cite 'loss by homoioteleuton' when a manuscript drops a line for exactly this reason.
“Fifteen men on a dead man's chest — yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.”
Keep reading the glossary
A rhetorical scheme in which successive clauses have the same length and grammatical structure.
A figure of speech that repeats the same word or phrase at the end of successive clauses.
Repeated vowel sounds in nearby words, binding a phrase together without rhyming it.
Repeated consonant sounds within or at the end of nearby words.