Boa

How to spell boa

3 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce boa

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does boa mean?

1. nounA large non-venomous snake that kills its prey by coiling around it and squeezing.
2. nounA long, fluffy stole of feathers or fur worn around the neck or shoulders.

Boa in a sentence

• The zoo keeper fed the captive boa a single rat each week.

• She draped a pink feather boa over her costume for the cabaret act.

• A boa can grow several metres long and squeeze its prey to death.

• The vintage shop sold a moth-eaten fur boa for next to nothing.

Where does boa come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from Latin boa, the name the Romans gave to a kind of large water serpent; the Roman writer Pliny the Elder used it in his natural history of the first century. The true origin of the Latin word is uncertain, and some ancient writers playfully linked it to bos, meaning 'ox', on the mistaken idea that the snake grew fat by sucking the milk of cattle, though that is folk explanation rather than fact. English took the word over directly in the late 1300s as a name for a snake, keeping the original Latin spelling unchanged. By the early 1800s the same word was applied to a long, round stole of feathers or fur worn around the neck, named for the way it coiled like the snake. The spelling stays delightfully simple, just three letters, which is why the surprise is that so short a word carries such an old and exotic history.

How the word is built

• boa (Latin name for a large serpent; an unanalysable single root, no prefix or suffix)