Definition and Examples of Consonance Word Sounds

Broadly, consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds; more specifically, consonance is the repetition of the final consonant sounds of accented syllables or important words. William Harmon notes that most so-called eye rhymes (such as word and lord, or blood, food, and good) are instances of consonance, as are the hymnals rhymes between between river and ever or heaven and given (A Handbook to Literature, 2006). See Examples and Observations below. Ten Titillating Types of Sound Effects in LanguageAlliterationAssonanceEuphonyFigure of SoundHomoioteleutonOnomatopoeiaParomoiosisPhonaestheticsRhymeTautophony Etymology From the Latin, agree sounds Examples and Observations The repetition of final consonant sounds, as in First and last, odds and ends, short and sweet, a stroke of luck, or Shakespeares struts and frets is CONSONANCE.(Laurence Perrine, Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, Harcourt, 1978)Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars.(Dylan Thomas, Quite Early One Morning. New Directions, 1954)Consonance in Rap LyricsConsonance  is quite often employed in rap, whether to underscore rhyme or to offer a kind of rhyme substitute. Lauryn Hills lines from the Fugees Zealots show consonance at work alongside rhyme:Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectileWhether Jew or Gentile, I rank top percentile,Many styles, More powerful than gamma raysMy grammar pays, like Carlos Santana playsConsonance with one sound (eck) shifts to multisyllable rhymes with another sound (projectile, Gentile, percentile) and then another (gamma rays, grammar pays, Santana plays). The result is as intricate as it is effortless.(Adam Bradley, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop. BasicCivitas, 2009)Seamus Heaneys Use of Consonance[In Seamus Heaneys poem Oceans Love to Ireland] the plosives i and k also serve to slow our reading, as do the alliteration and consonance of the bs and ds that begin here and continue in the second through fifth lines:Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree As Irelan d is backed to EnglandAnd drives inlandTill all her strands are breathless.We picture a deliberate, proud, unfrenzied man using language and physical strength to overpower the maid.(Karen Marguerite Moloney, Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope, University of Missouri Press, 2007) Pronunciation KON-se-nens Also Known As Half rhyme, slant rhyme