crasis

English

From Ancient Greek κρᾶσις (krâsis, “mixture”).

crasis (countable and uncountable, plural crases)

(obsolete) One's constitution; the balance of humours in a person's body.
- 1621, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford: Printed by Iohn Lichfield and Iames Short, for Henry Cripps, OCLC 216894069; The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd corrected and augmented edition, Oxford: Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, 1624, OCLC 54573970:
  , 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 2003, p. 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 […]

contraction of a vowel at the end of a word with the start of the next word