Definition:
Identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighboring words. See also:
Etymology:
From the Latin, "sound"Examples:
- "Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea."
(W.B. Yeats, "Byzantium") - "The spider skins lie on their sides, translucent and ragged, their legs drying in knots."
(Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm) - "Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light."
(Dylan Thomas, "Do not go gentle into that good night") - "The setting sun was licking the hard bright machine like some great invisible beast on its knees."
(John Hawkes, Death, Sleep, and the Traveler) - "It beats as it sweeps as it cleans."
(Slogan for Hoover vacuum cleaners) - "I must confess that in my quest I felt depressed and restless."
(Thin Lizzy, "With Love") - "A lanky, six-foot, pale boy with an active Adam's apple, ogling Lo and her orange-brown bare midriff, which I kissed five minutes later, Jack."
(Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita) - "Strips of tinfoil winking like people"
(Sylvia Plath, "The Bee Meeting")
Observations:
- "Beware of excessive assonance. Any assonance that draws attention to itself is excessive."
(John Earle, A Simple Grammar of English, 1898) - "Assonance, (or medial rime) is the agreement in the vowel sounds of two or more words, when the consonant sounds preceding and following these vowels do not agree. Thus, strike and grind, hat and man, 'rime' with each other according to the laws of assonance."
(J.W. Bright, Elements of English Versification, 1910) - "The terms alliteration, assonance, and rhyme identify kinds of recurring sound that in practice are often freely mixed together. . . . It may not be easy or useful to decide where one stops and another starts."
(Tom McArthur, The Oxford Companion to the English Language, 1992)
Pronunciation: ASS-a-nins
Also Known As: medial rhyme (or rime)
