> OED Entry Search
> 
> Term: aphesis
> 
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> Found: one match
> 
> aphesis
> 
> aphesis æ;fisis. a. Gr. afesij a letting go, f. afienai, f. af' off,
> away + ienai to send, let go, suggested by the Editor in 1880. The
> gradual and unintentional loss of a short unaccented vowel at the
> beginning of a word; as in squire for esquire, down for adown, St.
> Loy for St. Eloy, limbeck for alimbeck, 'tention! for attention! It
> is a special form of the phonetic process called Aphæresis, for
> which, from its frequency in the history of the English language, a
> distinctive name is useful. Now also used in the sense of aphæresis.
> 
>    * 1880 J. A. H. Murray in Trans. Philol. Soc. 175 The Editor can
>      think of nothing better than to call the phenomenon
>      Aphesis..and the resulting forms Aphetic forms.
> 
>    * 1930 A. Western in Gram. Misc. Jespersen 135, I do not quite
>      see the difference between aphesis and aphæresis, but use the
>      former term as the shorter and therefore more convenient of the
>      two;
> 
>    * 1932 W. L. Graff Lang. vi. 234 A loss at the beginning is
>      called aphaeresis or aphesis..bishop < Lat; episcopus, knife
>      and write in which k and w were formerly sounded.