Definition:
Identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighboring words.
Etymology:
From the Latin, "to sound"Examples & Observations:
- "Oh cleft effect! Cold modesty, hot wrath,
Both fire from hence and chill extincture hath."
(William Shakespeare [authorship uncertain], A Lover's Complaint) - "Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
(W.B. Yeats, "Byzantium") - "Beware of excessive assonance. Any assonance that draws attention to itself is excessive."
(John Earle, A Simple Grammar of English Now in Use, Smith, Elder, & Company, 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 and R.D. Miller, The Elements of English Versification, Ginn and Company, 1910) - "The terms alliteration, assonance, and rhyme identify kinds of recurring sound that in practice are often freely mixed together. In considering a poem, 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) - "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") - "It beats as it sweeps as it cleans."
(Advertising slogan for Hoover vacuum cleaners) - "Strips of tinfoil winking like people"
(Sylvia Plath, "The Bee Meeting")
Pronunciation: ASS-a-nins
