mixture

A mixture is what you get when different things are put together and stay themselves. Sand and salt in a jar, a handful of coins from three countries, cake mixture in a bowl before it goes in the oven.

In chemistry the word is exact: in a mixture the substances sit together without joining chemically, so you can pull them apart again by filtering the sand out or boiling the water off. That is what separates a mixture from a compound, where the parts have bonded into something new. Outside the lab it means any blend of unlike things, feelings included, as in a mixture of relief and guilt, or a mixture of accents in one street. It takes OF: a mixture of this and that. In British kitchens, cake mixture is the wet stuff before baking, which American recipes call batter, and a cough mixture is medicine in a bottle.