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Dissimilation, in the context of phonology, is a phenomenon whereby similar consonant sounds in a word have a tendency to become different over time, so as to ease pronunciation.
For instance, in Latin, the word medidies ("noon", "middle of the day") gradually changed into meridies, allowing a more relaxed, flowing pronunciation.
A considerably rarer phenomenon, consonant harmony, exerts the opposite effect, requiring that the consonant sounds of a word belong to the same class. In Navajo, for example, anterior fricatives (as in "Swiss") are rarely paired with non-anterior fricatives (as in "shush").
See alliteration.
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