Consonance is a type of rhyme where the same or similar consonant sounds are repeated in nearby words, but the vowel sounds are different. For example, "coming/home" or "hot/foot." Consonance is related to assonance, which involves repeating vowel sounds instead.

In poetry, consonance can create sound effects inside lines of verse. An example is the line "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day" from Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." In rhyming techniques, consonance is part of imperfect rhyme, also called "slant rhyme," "near-rhyme," or "off-rhyme." This happens when the final consonants in the stressed parts of words match, but the vowels before them are different, such as in "add-read" or "born-burn."

Consonance can repeat consonant sounds anywhere in stressed syllables, but alliteration is a specific type where the repeated consonants appear at the start of words. For example, "few flocked to the fight" or "around the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran." This type of consonance, called "consonantal alliteration," can help people remember parts of a text and is often used in slogans.

A special kind of consonance is sibilance, which repeats hissing sounds like /s/ and /ʃ/. An example is the line "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain" from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven." This line also includes assonance, which repeats vowel sounds like "ur." The word "sibilance" itself shows consonance.

Examples

In this stanza from Emily Dickinson's poem "As Imperceptibly As Grief," the words "begun" and "afternoon" use consonance to create a slant rhyme, also called a half rhyme. Consonance rhyming, in a strict sense, pairs words that share the same consonant sounds but have different vowel sounds, such as "fit" and "fat." Slant rhyming, however, pairs words with consonant sounds that are similar but not exactly the same, like "domestic" and "plastic" or "summer" and "somewhere."

Consonance is often used in hip-hop music. For example, in the song "Zealots" by the Fugees, the lines "Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectile / Whether Jew or gentile I rank top percentile" show consonance. This is also an example of internal rhyme, where rhyming occurs within a single line of text.