assonance

Other forms: assonances

"Blue cartoons play through the boob tube" is an example of assonance — when a bunch of words in a row share similar sounds (like the “oo” sound in the quote).

In poetry, assonance is when vowels within a word rhyme with other words, and there are lots of examples. Here’s one from English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “That solitude which suits abstruser musings.” Say it out loud and you can hear assonance clearly. The word comes from the Latin assonare, which literally translates as “respond to.” If you’re reading a sentence, and the words sound like they’re responding to each other — you could be detecting assonance.