Alliteration Explorer

Alliteration by initial sound and frequent word pairs

Explore alliteration patterns across 4.33 million verse lines from the Finnic runosong corpora. Discover which initial sounds, word pairs, and verses are most alliterative.

Initial sound	Verses	Word pairs
K	710,116	63,527
Vowels	440,782	38,671
P	379,204	34,752
S	312,366	27,891
V	311,764	25,475
T	299,582	25,394
L	219,855	18,490
M	204,449	17,266
H	109,369	8,100
N	97,327	6,923
R	79,784	5,859
J	44,212	3,491
W	5,381	229
C	1,146	21

Word pair (initial K)	Frequency
kanke kaske	1,118
kaks kolme	1,079
kaanike kaasike	997
kellon kuulin	987
kostis kuulis	868
kosti kuuli	734
kunne käsken	729
külmetavad küüned	726
kaasa kallis	715
kanike kaske	630
kerran kävin	596
kaksi kolme	569
kuiva kuuse	562
kaks kuus	544
kantke kaske	516
kulla kuule	511
karjas käisin	505
kirkkoon körö	468
kodu kolmi	456
kolme kuus	438
kostab kuuleb	426
kiikun kissa	413
kaks kolm	409
kerran kävelin	398
kannab kas	390
klaus kurki	379
kuked kulda	373
kuulamaie küla	367
kostin kuulin	362
kadri katri	331
kaksi kuu	328
kana kippas	328
kultanen kuningas	324
kostan kuulen	322
kuku küla	313
kadri külmetavad	312
kas kaske	304
kukub kägu	296
kostsin kuulsin	296
kultainen kuningas	295

This is a static summary — the full, searchable dataset is in the interactive explorer above.

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.