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I've debated this myself at length and I don't think there's a good publicly agreeable definition of the term.
But I'd use a working definition of "a situation which creates or encounters an edge-case in constitutional interpretation that demands either you ignore some clear constitutional rule, or adhere to the rule in a way that causes some serious harm to the country or its institutions."
I'd argue that the 'crisis' implicated in such a case would be that we end up with enough individual states adopting and insisting upon differing interpretations that it reduces the willingness to accept the entire instrument.
The most central example I could imagine is congress issuing a rule that, for instance, forcibly conscripted residents of only certain states for military service, and explicitly exempted others, maybe arguing that certain states were more critical for manufacturing or technical knowledge whilst others had higher populations and thus could bear the losses easier. And a divided Supreme Court upholds this in a 5-4 decision, and the President carries it out with aplomb.
This would be pretty 'crisis-like' because the Constitution does grant the authority to "raise armies" but doesn't explicitly lay out the limits on that power... and if given coalition of states could use their legislative heft to pass such a law over the objection of the 'victim' states, that would probably trigger some rebellious murmers and resistance. But if there was an active war that demanded conscription, rebellious states are also posing a national security risk.
Yeah, the overlap of military powers and state sovereignty are probably the areas most ripe for crisis territory.
Thus, I would absolutely argue that the Civil War was the original Constitutional Crisis, with the fundamental conflict being the fact that slavery was acknowledged... but not condoned in the original instrument, but also it would be impossible to remove it without the cooperation of a large contingency of states that were pro-slavery. And that there was no explicit right of secession outlined in there.
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