Or much less pointed, literary examples, such as the following passage from James Joyce’s “The Dead”, where alliteration is used on s’s and f’s – “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” Alliteration is dependent on the sounds, rather than the letters, so nine knocks is alliterate, but charred cords is not. Derived from “latira”, a Latin word meaning “letters of the alphabet”, alliteration is a stylistic device where a number of words with the same consonant sound are placed close together.