Sunday, October 14, 2012

Word of the Day for Sunday, October 14, 2012

crasis \KREY-sis\,
noun:
Composition; constitution; makeup.

Here they are bathed in the waters of oblivion until they retain no memory of the scenes through which they have passed; but they still preserve their original crasis and capacity.
-- Tobias George Smollett, "Adventures of an Atom"

This is all that ever staggered 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, seemed not to have had one single drop of Danish blood in his whole crasis…
-- Laurence Sterne, "Tristram Shandy"

Crasis is derived from the Greek word krâsis which meant "mixture, blend."

Dictionary.com Word of the Day