Assonance is when the same or similar vowel sounds are repeated in words or syllables that are close together. For example, the word "lean green meat" repeats the "ee" sound, and "Kip keeps capes" repeats the "k" sound. In American English, assonance refers only to vowel sounds, while the repetition of consonant sounds is called consonance. These two types can appear together, like in the words "six" and "switch," which share the same vowel and similar consonants. When the same or similar vowel sounds are repeated in writing, especially in stressed syllables, this may be called "vowel harmony" in poetry. However, linguists define "vowel harmony" differently.

A special kind of assonance is rhyme, where the ending parts of words (usually starting with the vowel sound of the last stressed syllable) are the same, such as in "fog" and "log" or "history" and "mystery." Assonance is an important part of poetry. It appears more often in poetry than in prose and is especially common in English-language poetry, Old French, Spanish, and Celtic languages.

In other words, assonance is a type of rhyme that depends only on vowel sounds. This means it is a similarity in the sounds of syllables. For example, in W. B. Yeats' poem "The Wild Swans at Coole," the words "swan" and "stone" rhyme because of their vowel sounds, showing assonance.

Examples

English poetry has many examples of assonance or consonance:

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight"
— E. E. Cummings, if a cheerfulest Elephantangelchild should sit
— William Shakespeare, "Sonnet 1"

This technique also appears in prose:

— James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
— Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Hip hop music often uses assonance:

— Eminem, "Without Me"

It can also be heard in other types of popular music:

— Thin Lizzy, "With Love"
— Will Smith, "Miami"
— Keaton Henson, "Small Hands"

Assonance is common in proverbs. Total assonance appears in some Pashto proverbs from Afghanistan:

• La zra na bal zra ta laar shta. "From one heart to another there is a way."
• Kha ghar lwar day pa sar laar lary. "Even if a mountain is very high, there is a path to the top."

This poetic device is found in the first line of Homer’s Iliad: Mê nin áeide, theá, Pêlêïádeō Akhilêos. Another example is Dies irae (likely by Thomas of Celano).

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, some stanzas include repeated vowel sounds.

In the following section from Hart Crane’s "To Brooklyn Bridge," the vowel [i] appears in many stressed syllables.

All rhymes in a section can be connected by vowel harmony to form one assonance. These types of stanzas appear in Italian or Portuguese poetry, in works by Giambattista Marino and Luís Vaz de Camões.

This is ottava rima (abababcc), a common form during the Renaissance that first appeared in epic poems.

Many examples of vowel harmony exist in French, Czech, and Polish poetry.