Alliteration is a literary device that involves the repetition of initial consonant sounds of nearby words in a phrase. It is often used to create a musical or rhythmic effect in writing or speech. Some literary experts also consider the repetition of vowel sounds or repetition at the end of words to be alliteration. Alliteration narrowly refers to the repetition of a letter in any syllables that, according to the poems meter, are stressed.

Symmetrical alliteration is a type of alliteration that uses parallelism, or repeating the same grammatical structure from one phrase to the next. With symmetrical alliteration, a phrase begins and ends with words that start with the same consonant sound and between them, like books between bookends, the words all start with another shared consonant sound.

Here are some examples of alliteration:

• "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers"
• "She sells seashells by the seashore"
• "Wild and woolly"
• "Drive through the doorway"
• "Beach-bound bathers"
• "Celebratory sensation"

The effect of alliteration is to give a more lyrical and flowing quality to a writers prose.