crasis

Noun

(plural crases)

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) 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.

Origin

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

SentencesSentence examples

Sentence Examples

Some anomalies, both of metre and of sense, may be removed by judicious emendation; and many lines become smooth enough, if we assume a crasis of open vowels of the same class, or a diphthongal pronunciation of others, or contraction or silence of certain suffixes as in Syriac. The oldest elegiac utterances are not couched in this metre; e.g.

Also Mentioned In

crases

coronis

Words near crasis in the dictionary