Alliteration Finder
Paste a poem or a passage and see its repeated sounds highlighted: alliteration, assonance and consonance, each found by pronunciation rather than by letter. Knight and night count as a match; cat and city do not. Every run is listed with its sound in IPA and the line it sits in. Free, no sign-up.
Words that begin with the same sound — knight and night match, cat and city do not.
Type or paste some verse or prose to find repeated sounds.
How to Use the Alliteration Finder
- Paste your text. Verse or prose both work. Keep stanzas apart with a blank line.
- Pick what to show. Alliteration, assonance or consonance. The three counts at the top always cover all of them; the highlighted text and the list show the one you chose.
- Set how close matches must be. Words allowed between matches decides how far apart two words can be and still belong to one run. Two is a good start.
- Read the runs. Each sound has its own colour. The list beneath gives the sound in IPA, the line, and the words.
Sounds, Not Letters
Alliteration is the repetition of a sound at the start of nearby words, and the sound is what counts. Knight and night begin with the same sound, so they alliterate. Phone and fan do too. Cat and city share a letter but not a sound, so they do not, and hour does not alliterate with house. The finder looks each word up in the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary and compares phonemes, which is why it can tell.
| Pattern | Rule used | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Alliteration | Two or more different words beginning with the same sound | furrow followed free |
| Assonance | Three or more words sharing a stressed vowel sound | a stressed ee sound in breeze, free and sea |
| Consonance | Three or more words ending on the same consonant sound | sweet, silent, thought |
A few choices are worth knowing. A run can cross a line break, because a reader hears Silver bells straight after the line before it, but never a blank line. Function words such as the, of and and are left out unless you tick the box; otherwise every the would match every that. For alliteration the word must be stressed on its first syllable, so bright alliterates with brook but not with between, whose stress falls on the second syllable. In the Old English tradition s followed by p, t or k alliterates only with the same cluster, so stone matches stand and not sing; the finder follows that rule. A word repeated unchanged is repetition rather than a sound pattern, so tinkle, tinkle, tinkle needs a different word to count.
A Worked Example
Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) opens a stanza The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, / The furrow followed free; / We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea. The finder reports three alliteration runs: breeze, blew on /b/; foam, flew, furrow, followed, free on /f/, one run that crosses from line one into line two; and silent, sea on /s/. Under consonance it adds first, burst, silent, all ending in /t/.
The first four lines of Shakespeare's Sonnet 30 give a different picture: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past… Here the /s/ run is sessions, sweet, silent, summon, there is a /w/ run in woes, wail, and sweet, silent, thought make a consonance run on /t/. That the same words show up in two patterns is normal; the highlighted view shows one pattern at a time to keep it readable.
- Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers comes out as one long /p/ run across all four lines of the tongue-twister, repeated words and all.
- A word not in the dictionary is left out and listed beneath the results, because the tool does not guess a sound from spelling.
- Vowels alliterate when they are the same vowel sound: apple and ant, not apple and ice.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is alliteration?
- Alliteration is the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of neighbouring words, as in Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Poets use it for rhythm and emphasis, and it also turns up in headlines and brand names.
- Do alliterative words have to start with the same letter?
- No, they have to start with the same sound. Knight and night alliterate although they are spelled differently, and cat and city do not although both begin with c.
- What is the difference between alliteration, assonance and consonance?
- Alliteration repeats the opening sound of words. Assonance repeats a vowel sound, as in the rain in Spain, and consonance repeats a consonant sound, usually at the end of words, as in lost and past. Sibilance is the special case of repeated s and sh sounds.
- Why does the finder ignore words like the and of?
- Function words are almost never the words a listener hears as part of a sound pattern, and counting them would make every sentence alliterative. You can switch them back on.
- Why was a word left out?
- Names, coinages and some rare words are not in the pronunciation dictionary. The tool lists them under the results rather than guess, since a guess from spelling is how knight and night would be told apart wrongly.
- Can I use it on prose?
- Yes. Paste a paragraph and keep the words-between setting low, so only genuinely close repetitions are flagged. Advertising copy and speeches are good places to look.
- Is my text sent anywhere?
- No. The pronunciation dictionary is downloaded once from this site and the matching runs in your browser.