Up your assonance!

Originally posted on Nearly Rhymes, 25 February 2011:

Here are the definitions for “assonance” in the Oxford English Dictionary:

1. Resemblance or correspondence of sound between two words or syllables.

2.

a. Prosody. The correspondence or rhyming of one word with another in the accented vowel and those which follow, but not in the consonants, as used in the versification of Old French, Spanish, Celtic, and other languages.

b. In extended use: = half-rhyme n. at half- comb. form 2o; the correspondence or rhyming of one word with another in the final (sometimes also the initial) consonant, but not in the vowel. Also applied by philologists, in studying rhyming pairs of words (i.e. with identical vowel), to final consonants of such similarity of articulation as to be acceptable, with poetic licence, in a rhyming position.

3. A word or syllable answering to another in sound.

4. transf. Correspondence more or less incomplete.

The lists of word pairs that this blog’s founder posted below include examples of “assonance” in each of these four senses. He has asked me to take the blog over for a while. So, here’s another list of miscellaneous assonantal word pairs:

• Other thunder
• Withered river
• Annual animal
• Inevitable vegetable
• Slippery hickory
• Slight hike
• Slither, mister!
• Panther’s answers (pace Ogden Nash)
• Handsome mansion
• Shifty sixty