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”).
