Other forms: snakes, snaking
A snake is a long animal with no legs that moves along the ground. A poisonous snake, a snake in the grass, snakes and ladders.
There are around four thousand species and about six hundred are venomous, of which perhaps two hundred can seriously harm a person. Britain has one venomous snake, the adder, and no recorded death from it in decades. A snake in the grass is a treacherous person, which is the oldest metaphor the animal carries. Note snake as a verb, meaning to wind.
1nounsnakeA long legless animal that moves along the ground.
“A snake slid across the path in front of us.”
2verbwindTo wind along a twisting course.
“The river snakes through the valley towards the sea.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
snake is an animal.
Old English snaca comes from a Germanic verb meaning to creep or slide. Sneak and snail come from the same creeping.
Middle English
snake
English, today
snake
Built from
From Middle English snake. From Middle English snake, from Old English snaca (“snake, serpent, reptile”), from Proto-West Germanic snakō (“slider, snake”), from snakan (“to creep, slide”), related to Old High German snahhan (“to sneak, slide”). Compare also Proto-Germanic snēkô (“creeper, crawler”). Cognate with German Low German Snake, Snaak (“snake”), dialectal German Schnake (“adder”), Danish snog (“grass snake”), Swedish snok (“grass snake”), Norwegian Nynorsk snåk (“viper, adder”), Faroese snákur (“grass snake”), Icelandic snákur (“snake”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA