 Alliteration is the repetition of the same sound at the start of a series of words and succession, whose purpose is to provide an audible pulse that gives a piece of writing a lulling, lyrical, and or emotive effect. That previous paragraph is an example of alliteration. However, you can see a more subtle, much better example in Jumbo Lahiri's short story, This Blessed House. Sanjeev didn't know what love was, only what he thought it was not. It was not returning to an empty, carpeted condominium, turning away politely when other men eventually put their arms around the waist of their wives and girlfriends, or working his way methodically through the major composers that the catalog recommended. In this passage, you can see how the gentle pulse of repeated initial sounds adds a sort of ruminative character to Sanjeev's wistful thoughts about what love is and isn't. Alliteration here isn't just an ornamental characteristic of the prose. It also does something to you as a reader. It makes you sway, perhaps, as you read, making you feel some of the feelings that the fictional Sanjeev is feeling by putting the language into your body. Because alliteration is a type of sonic repetition, but also because it's playful and musical, it has a mnemonic quality. That means it helps you remember things. For this reason, alliteration is often used in the corporate world, so for instance, TED Talks, Door Dash, Dunkin' Donuts, and PayPal, these companies probably wouldn't be as successful if they were TED speeches, Porch Dash, Dunkin' Pastries, and PayFriend. Repetition legitimizes. These business names are easy to remember, but they also somehow feel more trustworthy than their non-alliterative alternatives. Alliteration is a powerful rhetorical tool, then, but it's also incredibly important to English-language literature and poetry. But to find out why it's so important, we need to travel back in time to some of the earliest extant examples of the English language. So, around a thousand years ago, the English language, and specifically English poetry, looked something like this. Nu schul'n herin, hef'n ritches werd, mechthor is mechthee, and his mojethank, work, wolderfadre, swahimundre hewes, etchetrichten, or astellidae. Now, you don't need to know Old English to hear that these lines of poetry don't use end rhymes like many more traditional English poetic forms do today. That's because English poetry for many hundreds of years couldn't care less about end rhyme. Instead, it used alliteration, or what in this context we call head rhyme, like you can see in the Old English example I just read. The reasons for this have to do with a couple of qualities of the English language and other related languages in the Germanic language family like German and Old Norse. These languages differ in some really important ways from other European languages, especially Romance languages like French, Italian, and Spanish, and these are languages that often use end rhymes in their more traditional poetic forms. So, what makes English different? First, unlike Romance languages, which put word stresses on the last or the second to last syllable of a word, English tends to stress the first syllable in its words. You can hear the difference in stress really clearly if you look at some French and English cognates. So, whereas English says rival, in French we say revol, in English we say dentist, and in French we say dentiste, in English we say culture, and in French we say couture. So, second, unlike many verbs and nouns in Romance languages, English verbs and nouns just don't have a lot of reliable similar word endings, simply because of the way English grammar works. Now, the reasons for this are beyond the scope of this video, but essentially what this means is that it's actually harder to rhyme in English than it is in French, even though the English language has somewhere between two and four times as many words as French does. So, on the one hand, English tends to emphasize the importance of the first syllable while de-emphasizing the importance of the last syllable in words, and second, it's actually a little harder to use end rhyme in English than in some other European languages. So you can see why English poetry would tend not to stress the final syllables of a line, and instead to stress the similarity of initial sounds of words using alliteration or head rhyme. The final sounds of English words just aren't as important as the first sounds. Alliteration works well, then, with some of the stresses and the more traditional grammatical forms of the English language. This is true 1,000 years ago, and it's still pretty true today. But this doesn't mean that poetic use of alliteration is just about stressed syllables and grammatical forms. When poets use alliteration, they carefully balance these characteristics with the meanings of words and the emotions or tone of the passage. The point of alliteration isn't just to line up word stresses with initial sounds and to think about grammar, but in doing so to create a beautiful form of art that makes you the reader feel something. This also means that whether alliteration sounds good or bad has a lot to do with its context. And because alliteration is about sound, either heard or imagined, whether alliteration works well or not often has to do with how it's performed. But performance is incredibly subjective. I'll give you an example. Some of the best contemporary poetry, rap music, uses alliteration masterfully. But as you'll hear, it just doesn't sound particularly good when I recite it out loud. So here's an example for Mick Jenkins' P's and Q's. I've been on my P's and Q's. You can see I do not play. And I'm packing full of quotes. Pray you perceive it in a way that I intended. I ain't preaching and I'm never that pretentious, not pretending, quasi-modo how my back is. I've been bending, I've been lifting all the pounds, break it down, pass it around. Now, okay, you can probably hear the alliteration, but did you really feel it? The virtuosity of this interlaced alliteration where repeating initial P, I, and B sounds are braided into each other, just doesn't shine through when I read it in the same way it does when Mick Jenkins does. I'm missing a sample, a baseline, and a beat, and I definitely don't have his vocal timbre, his cadence, or his flow. This is one of the beautiful and complex and sometimes frustrating things about alliteration. Because it's a rhetorical technique that's built out of the idea of sound, the quality of an alliterative line, how effective it is often depends on things that happen beyond the written word on the page, whether that's in your actual ear or in the ear of your mind. So, next time you encounter alliteration, don't just ask yourself how the alliterating words match up with the important words in the sentence or poetic line, although you should definitely do that. In addition, ask yourself how it sounds when you read it out loud, and what it might have sounded like when its first performers performed it.