Alliteration Explorer

About

This tool explores alliteration patterns across 4.33 million verse lines from Finnish (SKVR, Kirjalliset Runot, Julkaisemattomat Runot) and Estonian (ERAB) runosong corpora. In runosong, strong alliteration means two or more content words in a verse line starting with the same letter. Weak alliteration means vowel-initial content words together (all vowels alliterate in the Finnic tradition).

Keyboard Shortcuts

/ Focus search S Share URL X CSV export R Random letter ? Toggle this help 1 Letters tab 2 Verses tab 3 Compare tab 4 Corpus Rates tab 5 Sound Preference tab Esc Close help

Features

Initial Sound Browser: Click a letter to see the most common alliterative word pairs starting with that letter.
Search: Type a word to see its top alliterative partners (words sharing the same initial that co-occur in verses).
Top Verses: Browse the most alliterative verses in the corpus, ranked by alliteration density and word count.
Language Comparison: Compare alliteration patterns between the Estonian and Finnish corpora.
Sound Preference: See which initial sounds the alliterative system favours beyond their natural frequency — a diverging-bar preference index (above or below 1.0×), sortable by preference or frequency.
Compare Letters: Select two letters to see shared/unique pairs and statistical comparison.
CSV Export: Export the current view data as a CSV file.

Data

Data is sharded by initial letter for fast loading. Each shard contains word-level alliteration statistics including co-occurrence frequencies and partner lists.