elision

elision, in Greek and Latin speech and writing, the ‘thrusting out’, i.e. dropping, of a vowel at the end of one word before a vowel at the beginning of the next; in Greek this feature was confined mainly to the short final vowels a, e, o, and sometimes i; in Latin it extended to the dropping of long final vowels also, and of syllables ending in m; early Latin writers sometimes elided final s. In Latin poetry the elided vowels are printed but dropped in scansion (compare CRASIS).