crasis

Noun

crasis (countable and uncountable, plural crases)

1. (obsolete) One's constitution; the balance of humours in a person's body.
   • Some men have peculiar symptoms, according to their temperament and crasis, which they had from the stars and those celestial influences […], I.iii.1.2
   • 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 crasis1759, Laurence Sterne, The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Penguin, published 2003, page 24
2. A mixture or combination.
3. 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.
   • 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 […]1861, William Edward Jelf, Accidence