Snaky means winding, or sly and treacherous. A snaky path, a snaky queue, a snaky remark.
The shape sense is neutral and describes anything that bends back and forth. The character sense borrows the whole folklore of the snake, and in Australian slang snaky simply means angry, which is a third and separate use.
1adjectivesnakyWinding, or sly and treacherous.
“A snaky road climbs the mountain through dozens of hairpin bends.”
snaky is a quality.
Middle English
snake
English
snake
English, today
snaky
Built from
From snake + -y. snake comes 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