Sunday, May 23, 2010

Assonating Compounds

Akin to rhyming compounds are compounds made up essentially of two words with (1) coincidence of vowels (“vowel-rhyme”) without regard to consonants (home and tone; come and hush); or (2) coincidence of consonants or consonant-sounds but with different vowels (e.g. sack and sock, tax and ticks) – Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, 1974. The term for such correspondence in words is assonance. For want of a better term, I propose assonating compounds – styled after rhyming compounds – to encompass the relevant word-pairs.

The following are examples of assonating compounds: bric-a-brac, dilly-dally, dribs and drab, flimflam, flip-flop, gewgaw, mish-mash, ping-pong, riff-raff, seesaw, sing-song, whim-wham, whippersnapper, wishy-washy, zigzag.

No comments:

Post a Comment