Ablaut reduplication
The convention means that when a word is repeated with an altered vowel, then if there are three words the vowel order is I, A, O, if there are two words the first is I and the second is either A or O. Other examples of expressions following the convention are: bish-bash-bosh, chit-chat, dilly-dally, shilly-shally, tip top, hip-hop, flip-flop, sing song, ding dong, King Kong, ping pong, clip clop, tip top, wishy washy and tick tock. Syntactic doubling means the lengthening of a word's initial consonant in certain contexts; Amre?ita (Sanskrit rather than English) is a compound consisting of the same word repeated with the first occurrence accented; an irreversible binomial is a pair or group of words used together in fixed order as an idiomatic expression, e.g. milk and honey.
