English

Noun

metaphasis ‎(uncountable)

1. The accidental transposition of part of the sounds of two words in a phrase; The production of spoonerisms.
   • 1953, Sir Ernest Barker, Age and Youth: Memories of Three Universities ; And, Father of the Man, page 46:

     'Oxford's great metaphasiarch', as Punch once called him, was seldom guilty of metaphasis, or the transposition of sounds. What he transposed was ideas.

   • 1979, Gore Vidal, Kalki, ISBN 0345278739, page 31:

     Dr. Ashok suffered from a mild form of metaphasis. He made Spoonerisms.

   • 1986 October 23, Adrian Room, “Letters”, in London Review of Books:

     But couldn’t it be that there is a distinction to be made between ‘metaphasis’ and ‘metathesis’? The OED defines the latter as ‘the interchange of position between sounds or letters in a word’ (my italics). An example would be Old English bridd becoming modern bird. This leaves ‘metaphasis’ free to describe what Spooner did: transpose sounds between different words, like his classic ‘our queer Dean’.

   • 2009, Denise Sutherland, Word Searches For Dummies, ISBN 0470453664, page 76:

     The technical term for this transposition is metaphasis.

Noun

metaphasis ‎(plural metaphases)

1. (biology) Alternative form of metaphase
   • 2013, Davide Schiffer, Brain Tumors: Pathology and its Biological Correlates, ISBN 8847029139:

     The sister chromatid exchange (SCE) assay measures the drug-induced metaphasis SCE.

   • 1992, Pieter Jan Cornelis Kuiper, Plantago: a multidisciplinary study, page 234:

     The reason is that homologous pairing takes place before metaphasis, during pachytene.

   • 1893 February 2, Arthur Lister, “On the division of Nuclei in the Mycetozoa”, in The Journal of the Linnean Society of London: Botany, volume 29, page 531:

     The nuclei at the 9.55 stage show some indication of change, but none of them have reached the metaphasis of the process of division, while at 11.25 the metaphasis was finished and the protoplasm already aggregated round the daughter nuclei.

2. (biology) Alternative form of metaphysis
   • 2013, B. G. Brogdon, ‎Tor Shwayder, & Jamie Elifritz, Child Abuse and its Mimics in Skin and Bone, ISBN 1466581123:

     There is abrupt lateral bending of the medial cortex wall of the proximal tibial metaphasis and, in the older child, deformity and retarded development of the ipsilateral epiphyseal plateau68

   • 2012, Selene G. Parekh, Foot and Ankle Surgery, ISBN 9350905795, page 82:

     Next, a 1 cm longitudinal incision is created dorsally over the proximal shaft and metaphasis of the proximal phalanx.

   • 1955, Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital - Volume 97, page 408:

     The evidence of previous fractures is seen in the metaphasis as masses of calcified matrix showing an abnormal architecture and surrounded by an excess of bone.