alliteration [Lat. ad ‘to,’ littera ‘letter (of the alphabet)’]

Repetition of homophonous accented, syllableinitial phonemes, as in house and home, cash and carry, tea for two, usually for stylistic or poetic effect. Alliteration can be useful in the reconstruction of historical linguistic features; in Germanic alliterative verse (e.g. the ‘Edda’) all vowels were alliterative since the glottal stop before vowels was realized as a consonant. Moreover, the combinations sp, st, sk were considered phoneticphonological units, since they-like all consonants-alliterated only with themselves.