(n.) The repetition of the same letter at the beginning of two or more words immediately succeeding each other, or at short intervals; as in the following lines: -
Example Sentences:
(1) Set in the earliest days of the caped crusader's crime-fighting career – holy alliteration, Batman!
(2) That tartan rug is a heather-hued heath before my hearth (alliteration too!).
(3) If he could get treatment for his addiction to alliteration and stop using phrases like "for you and I", this prodigiously talented "small boy of 52", as he described himself two years ago, could walk away with the Booker prize."
(4) There were no significant age differences as regards the relative frequency with which different phonemes were manipulated in rhyme and alliteration.
(5) A battery of metalinguistic tests, incorporating the production of poems, nursery rhymes, alliteration and rhyme, was designed to assess the subjects' sound-based language play.
(6) But to me, alliteration is the warp and weft of the poem, without which it is just so many fine threads.
(7) Nod to people on all points of the political spectrum … Add a soupcon of alliteration.
(8) Has any other Cup final team achieved a similar degree of alliteration?"
(9) In this study were compared the phonological awareness of 15 moderately to severely phonologically impaired and 15 phonologically normal children, matched on mental age and gender, on sensitivity to alliteration and to rhyme.
(10) It did still talk about social security and social insurance, but it also, unthinkingly, adopted the now well-worn alliteration of "welfare to work".
(11) Children with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and dyslexia (n = 82) made significantly more errors than normally reading children with ADD (n = 83) on a simple auditory test of phonological sensitivity to rhyme and alliteration (Bradley, 1984).
(12) A line like "and retrieves the intestines in time-honoured style" might appear not to alliterate at first glance.
(13) He chose the line carelessly, presumably for its alliteration, and with an utter disregard for truth and the dire consequences his distortions will have on real people, including the very ones who elected him.
(14) A subgroup of children with dyslexia who were sensitive to rhyme and alliteration had higher scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) Spatial factor than a dyslexic subgroup who were phonologically insensitive.
(15) Perhaps it is the alliteration, which has a kind of playful quality; maybe it’s because we associate barrels with beer and wine.
(16) There is much more stitching them together, though, than their shared activities and love of alliteration.
(17) In an experimental study on hypertensive and healthy subjects, the role of anxiety, sex, and disease for the response of plasma epinephrine (E) and norepinephrine (NE) to pain (venipuncture) and mental stress (word alliteration) was investigated.
(18) There may never be a better concise description of that evidently charmed time and place than MacDonald's wry paragraph, with its gathering rhythm and subtle alliteration: "During the academic year of 1968-69, Cambridge University felt an alien influence from beyond its sober curtain walls.
(19) On the subject of alliteration, it should be mentioned that within each line it is the stressed syllables which count.
(20) Specific analysis is focused on those stretches of speech which exhibit perseveration to the point where there is an excessive amount of alliteration and assonance.
Simile
Definition:
(n.) A word or phrase by which anything is likened, in one or more of its aspects, to something else; a similitude; a poetical or imaginative comparison.
Example Sentences:
(1) Merely being around Soames – who is bulky, self-assured, and often speaks in similes that involve things like spaniels, grandmothers, rhododendrons and oysters – evokes sensations of an earlier, stronger Britain.
(2) "My hope is that the similes will repair what gets broken by the biographies, in the same way that the natural world does.
(3) The poem is structured like a lament, the soldiers' epitaphs interspersed with direct translations of Homer's extended similes, each of which is transcribed, lullingly, twice over.
(4) It's hard not to describe this creature without resorting to multiple similes – it's like a mushroom, an umbrella, a beating heart, an alien lifeform – all of which diminish its glory, as indeed does the word "jellyfish".
(5) She has terrific way with ideas, simile (“as lazy as a corpse”) and visual takes: “There are many women on the Kurfürstendamm.
(6) And some of her lyrics, even viewed coldly on a page, are impressive: "I carve lyrics into cubicle doors like they were pyramid walls and these were hieroglyphs, hold pen with an iron grip, my mind is the storm and the words are the eye in it," she raps on one track, and yet when she adds, "Evil in the world, stay peaceful in spite of it; 'cause snakes have never understood the way the lions live", you don't think, wow, amazing, you think – nice simile, but what on earth do you mean?
(7) Andrew Cooper, Conservative peer: ‘It is no accident that Fallon used Miliband’s political fratricide as his simile’ Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andrew Cooper.
(8) Then comes the powerful simile of the cigarette "like a fire lit by a survivor".
(9) Another debate speaker launched a simile about a broken-legged camel that was cruelly cut off by the red light.)
(10) Even the name Jeremy Hunt is so redolent of upper-class brutality that it feels like he belongs in one of those Martin Amis books where working-class people are called things like Dave Rubbish and Billy Darts (No shade, Martin – I’m just a joke writer: I envy real writers, their metaphors and similes taking off into the imagination sky like big birds or something).
(11) Furthermore, from knowledge of the enzyme kinetics of the system we have been able to build a model of the pathway that allows us computer similation of its behavior and calculation of the Flux Control Coefficient profile at different glucose concentrations.
(12) Six parasite species (Phyllodistomum simile, Crowcrocaecum testiobliquum, Crepidostomum metoecus, Cyathocephalus truncatus, Truttaedacnitis truttae and Dentitruncus truttae) were recovered.
(13) But Wodehouse's pre-eminent stylistic flourish is his use of metaphor and simile: "Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes"; a man "wilts" like "a salted snail" – and one finds the same in his letters.
(14) Hence a "simil-estrogen", more than an "anti-estrogen" mechanism of action is postulated and a selection of patients for treatment in the "mid postmenopausal age" is recommended.
(15) In the Gospels, the metamorphosis caused by the epileptic seizure is used as a simile for Christ's transfiguration through suffering, death, and resurrection.
(16) If this seems a slightly odd simile, bear in mind Greek medics were not familiar with dissection and so could only observe protruding tumours.)
(17) The result was a hydrothorax that allowed a severe cardiac simile tamponed syndrome.
(18) Of course, it is no accident that the defence secretary, Michael Fallon, chose to use Miliband’s political fratricide as his simile.
(19) In 1846 Hebra, under the name of Seborrhea Congestiva described disc-shaped patches and introduced the butterfly simile for the malar rash.
(20) "One of the reasons I repeat the similes is that you need time off from the grief," Oswald explains.