The characteristic set-piece descriptions in alliterative poetry build upon the inclusiveness of the vocabulary. Poets, particularly those from the north, could draw on a range of synonyms to express the common concept ‘man’, ‘knight’: to the standard stock of words such as lord, man, knight and wight, used by Chaucer and other writers, alliterative poets added burne, freke, gome, hatel, lede, renk, schalk, segge, tulk and wye. All are derived from the Old English poetic word-hoard, with the exception of tulk, which is from Old Norse. Nouns such as blonk, ‘horse’, douth, ‘army’, bent in the sense ‘battlefield’, all recorded in Old English poetry, are regularly used by northern poets, though found rarely, if at all, outside alliterative verse. Such words are of ‘high alliterative rank’, predominantly carrying the alliteration of the line. The same is true of verbs meaning ‘go, hasten’, such as buske, ferke, kever, raike, skelte, strake, thringe and trine; adjectives such as athel, ‘noble’, cof, ‘nimble’, runish, ‘mysterious’, wale, ‘excellent’ and wlonk, ‘splendid’; and adverbs meaning ‘quickly’, such as graithely, naitely, rapely, taytely and yederly. Half of these words are of Old English origin and have counterparts in poems such as Beowulf, and half are derived from Old Norse; only kever comes from French. Poetic compounds reminiscent of Old English usage are not uncommon, such as chyn-wedys, ‘chin-clothing’, i.e. ‘beard’, dragon-hame, ‘dragon-covering’, i.e. ‘dragon's skin’, fetherhame, ‘plumage’, here-wedes and stele-wedes, ‘armour’. To extend further the range of vocabulary, the poets use adjectives as nouns, such as (to denote a lovely lady): tat blissful, bright, fre, clene, comly, gay, hende, shene and wlonk; tat grene ‘the green man’, te naked ‘the naked flesh’, and so on. Such traditional features of the vocabulary contribute to the elevated tone of the style.

The effects enabled may be demonstrated by comparing two contemporary translations of the description of Alexander's fearsome horse Bucephalus in the Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni, which provide revealing contrasts in style and vocabulary. The first is from the Prose Life of Alexander: