Alliteration Examples: 71 From Tongue Twisters to Poe and Shakespeare

November 2, 2026

"Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" repeats one sound, p, at the start of six words. That repetition is alliteration, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as the same sound, usually a consonant, at the beginning of words that are close together, and two words are enough: its own example is "live and learn".

Tongue Twisters

A tongue twister is alliteration pushed until the mouth trips. These are traditional:

1. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
2. She sells seashells by the seashore.
3. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
4. Betty Botter bought some butter, but she said, "The butter's bitter."
5. Round the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran.
6. A big black bug bit a big black bear.
7. Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
8. The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick.

Brand Names

Brand names use it too:

9. Coca-Cola
10. PayPal
11. Dunkin' Donuts
12. Best Buy
13. Krispy Kreme
14. Kit Kat
15. Tic Tac
16. Rolls-Royce
17. Range Rover
18. Chuck E. Cheese

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Character Names

19. Peter Parker (Spider-Man)
20. Bruce Banner (the Hulk)
21. Lois Lane and Lex Luthor (Superman)
22. Wonder Woman
23. Reed Richards (Fantastic Four)
24. Matt Murdock (Daredevil)
25. Pepper Potts (Iron Man)
26. Severus Snape (Harry Potter)
27. Luna Lovegood (Harry Potter)
28. Godric Gryffindor (Harry Potter)
29. Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse
30. Donald Duck

To pair a first and last name by sound for your own cast, try the character name generator.

Everyday Phrases

31. busy as a bee
32. good as gold
33. right as rain
34. cool as a cucumber
35. fit as a fiddle
36. pretty as a picture
37. home sweet home
38. last but not least
39. mind over matter

Most of these are similes too, and all of them are clichés: fine in a character's mouth, tired in narration.

Alliteration in Literature, by Sound

Thirty-two lines from poems, plays and novels, grouped by the sound they repeat.

The F Sound

40. "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, / The furrow followed free:"

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part 2. Six f words while the ship runs before a good wind.

41. "From forth the fatal loins of these two foes"

    William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Prologue.

42. "Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air."

    Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1. The witches' first chant.

43. "Full fathom five thy father lies. / Of his bones are coral made."

    Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2. Ariel's song about a drowning that never happened.

44. "Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste"

    John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, the opening lines.

The B Sound

45. "Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade, / He bravely broach’d his boiling bloody breast;"

    Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 5, Scene 1. Nine b words in two lines, overdone on purpose: this is the amateur actors' play, and Shakespeare is mocking bad verse.

46. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

    F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, the last sentence.

47. "Tiger, tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night,"

    William Blake, "The Tiger", in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The t and the b each come in a pair.

48. "Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away."

    Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias", in his Complete Poetical Works. Three pairs in two lines: b, then l, then s.

The D Sound

49. "Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,"

    Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part 2. The wind dies, and "down" both opens the line and closes it.

50. "Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, / Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;"

    Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven, stanza 5.

51. "whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul"

    Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 1.

52. "Marley was as dead as a door-nail."

    Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave 1. Dickens takes the stock phrase and then wonders aloud why a door-nail, and not a coffin-nail, should be the deadest piece of ironmongery.

53. "Double, double, toil and trouble; / Fire, burn; and cauldron, bubble."

    Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 1. A doubled d, a t pair, then "burn" and "bubble".

The M Sound

54. "Five miles meandering with a mazy motion"

    Coleridge, "Kubla Khan", in his Complete Poetical Works. The line winds like the river it describes.

55. "Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, / The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees."

    Alfred Tennyson, The Princess, Part 7. The m and n sounds hum like the bees.

56. "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,"

    John Keats, "To Autumn", in Poems Published in 1820, the first line.

57. "I CAUGHT this morning morning's minion, king- / dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Fal- / con, in his riding"

    Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Windhover", in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. An m run, then a d run, with words broken across the line ends.

58. "Hear the sledges with the bells-- / Silver bells! / What a world of merriment their melody foretells!"

    Poe, "The Bells", in The Complete Poetical Works. The m pair closes the line, after an s pair and a w pair.

The S and Sh Sounds

59. "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past,"

    Shakespeare, Sonnet 30.

60. "Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,"

    Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn", in Poems Published in 1820.

61. "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain"

    Poe, The Raven, stanza 3. The s sounds run through the middles of words too, so the whole line rustles.

62. "and after the fire a still small voice."

    King James Bible, 1 Kings 19:12. After the wind, the earthquake and the fire, two quiet s words.

63. "Storm'd at with shot and shell, / Boldly they rode and well,"

    Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade", in Maud, and Other Poems.

The G Sound

64. "the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees"

    Rudyard Kipling, "The Elephant's Child", in Just So Stories. Kipling repeats the phrase through the story like a refrain.

65. "We passed the fields of gazing grain, / We passed the setting sun."

    Emily Dickinson, "Because I could not stop for Death" (titled "The Chariot" in this edition), in Poems, Three Series.

66. "Nature's first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold."

    Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay", in New Hampshire. A g pair, then four breathy h words.

67. "By the shores of Gitche Gumee, / By the shining Big-Sea-Water,"

    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha, "Hiawatha's Childhood". A g pair inside the name, with b and sh around it.

The N, K and P Sounds

68. "While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,"

    Poe, The Raven, stanza 1. Three n words, then the knock at the door.

69. "When I do count the clock that tells the time,"

    Shakespeare, Sonnet 12. A k pair and a t pair, like a clock ticking.

70. "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,"

    Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5.

71. "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!"

    Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave 1, on Scrooge. The k pair comes at the end of a run of s and -ing words.

How to Use Alliteration in Fiction

Prose can't carry alliteration at the density of "The Raven". What works in a novel is smaller:

• Two words, not six. Melville's "damp, drizzly November" is a pair inside an ordinary sentence, and the sentence still reads as plain prose.
• Put it where the sentence lands. Fitzgerald puts four b words into the last sentence of the whole book.
• Match the sound to the scene. A run of hard stops in a tender moment fights what the sentence says.
• Watch for the accidental kind. A sentence like "she sat silently, sipping her soup" can turn up in a draft by accident and reads as a tongue twister. Reading the page aloud catches it.

For words that imitate the noise they name, see these onomatopoeia examples; for simile, metaphor and the other comparisons, the figurative language examples.

Alliteration FAQ

Does alliteration have to use the same letter?

No, the same sound. "Phone" and "fish" alliterate with different letters. "Cat" and "city" share a c and don't, and neither do "knife" and "kite".

Is alliteration the same as assonance and consonance?

They're related. Assonance repeats a vowel sound inside words, like the short e in Poe's "Hear the mellow wedding bells" from "The Bells". Consonance repeats a consonant inside or at the end of words, like the ck in "black duck". Alliteration is the one that sits at the start.