Alliteration is a stylistic literary device identified by the repeated sound of the first consonant in a series of multiple words, or the repetition of the same sounds of the same kinds of sounds at the beginning of words or in stressed syllables of a phrase. "Alliteration" from the Latin word “litera”, meaning “letters of the alphabet”, and the first known use of the word to refer to a literary device occurred around 1624. Alliteration narrowly refers to the repetition of a
consonant in any syllables that, according to the poem's
meter, are stressed, as in
James Thomson's verse "Come…dragging the
lazy
languid
Line a
long". Another example is,
"Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers".