crasis

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

• IPA^(key): /ˈkɹeɪsɪs/
• Rhymes: -eɪsɪs

crasis (countable and uncountable, plural crases)

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: Printed by 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 […]

• ACRISS, Sarics, crissa