Other forms: serpents
A serpent is a great snake, especially one in a legend or a sacred text. The serpent in the garden, a sea serpent, coiled like a serpent.
It is the literary and biblical word: snake is the ordinary one, and serpent is chosen for weight. The serpent of Genesis is one of the most consequential animals in Western culture, and sea serpents fill the margins of old charts. Note serpentine, meaning winding — a serpentine path, the Serpentine in Hyde Park; and that the word covers no biological category at all, only a tone.
1nounserpentA great snake, especially one of legend.
“The serpent appears on about half the carvings in the church.”
serpent is a snake.
Latin serpens is the present participle of serpere, to creep — a serpent is literally a creeping thing. The same root gives serpentine and, at a distance, the Greek herpeton, which is where herpetology comes from.
Old French
serpent
Middle English
serpent
English, today
serpent
Built from
From Middle English serpent, from Old French serpent. From Middle English serpent, from Old French serpent (“snake, serpent”), from Latin serpēns (“snake”), present active participle of serpō (“to creep, crawl”), from Proto-Italic serpō, from Proto-Indo-European serp-. In this sense, displaced native nǣdre, whence Modern English adder. Compare Sanskrit सर्प (“snake”), which is a descendant of the same Proto-Indo-European word as serpent.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA