crasis
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English
Etymology
From Ancient Greek κρᾶσις (krâsis, “mixture”).
Pronunciation
Noun
crasis (countable and uncountable, plural crases)
- (obsolete) One's constitution; the balance of humours in a person's body.
- 1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: , 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC:, I.iii.1.2:
- Some men have peculiar symptoms, according to their temperament and crasis, which they had from the stars and those celestial influences
- 1759, Laurence Sterne, The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Penguin, published 2003, page 24:
- This is all that ever stagger'd my faith in regard to Yorick’s extraction, who, by what I can remember of him, and by all the accounts I could ever get of him, seem'd not to have had one single drop of Danish blood in his whole crasis
- A mixture or combination.
- (linguistics) External vowel sandhi; contraction of a vowel or diphthong at the end of a word with a vowel or diphthong at the start of the following word.
- 1861, William Edward Jelf, Accidence:
- When in a crasis, a lene consonant […] is combined with an aspirated vowel, the lene is always changed (except in the Ionic dialect) into the corresponding aspirate […]
Translations
contraction of a vowel at the end of a word with the start of the next word
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