crasis

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English

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Etymology

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From Ancient Greek κρᾶσις (krâsis, mixture).

Pronunciation

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Noun

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crasis (countable and uncountable, plural crases)

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  1. (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
  2. A mixture or combination.
  3. (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

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Anagrams

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