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Webster 1913 Edition


Crasis

Cra′sis

(kr?′s?s)
,
Noun.
[LL., temperament, fr. Gr. [GREEK][GREEK][GREEK][GREEK], fr. [GREEK][GREEK][GREEK][GREEK] to mix.]
1.
(Med.)
A mixture of constituents, as of the blood; constitution; temperament.
2.
(Gram.)
A contraction of two vowels (as the final and initial vowels of united words) into one long vowel, or into a diphthong; synæresis; as, cogo for coago.

Webster 1828 Edition


Crasis

CRASIS

,
Noun.
[Gr., to mix, to temper.]
1.
The temper or healthy constitution of the blood in an animal body; the temperament which forms a particular constitution of the blood.
2.
In grammar, a figure by which two different letters are contracted into one long letter or into a diphthong.

Definition 2024


crasis

crasis

English

Noun

crasis (plural crases)

  1. (obsolete) One's constitution; the balance of humours in a person's body.
    • 1621, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 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
  2. A mixture or combination.
  3. (linguistics) The 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 []

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