Python
nounA large, non-venomous snake that kills its prey by coiling around it and squeezing.
How to spell python
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce python
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does python mean?
- nounA large, non-venomous snake that kills its prey by coiling around it and squeezing.
Python in a sentence
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The zoo keeper carefully fed the enormous python in its glass enclosure.
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A python can swallow prey far larger than its own head.
Where does python come from?
Language of origin: Greek
The word comes from the Greek Puthon, the name of a giant serpent or dragon that, in myth, guarded the oracle at Delphi until the god Apollo killed it. The Greeks linked the name to the region called Pytho, the older name for the site of Delphi itself. Latin took the name over as python, and English adopted it in the early 1600s, at first only as a reference to the mythical monster. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries naturalists borrowed the same word to label the large, non-venomous constricting snakes of Africa, Asia, and Australia, and that zoological sense is now the everyday one. Much later the name was reused again for a popular programming language, which its creator named not after the snake but after the comedy troupe Monty Python, so the spelling carries an unusually layered history.
How the word is built
- python (from Greek Puthon, the name of the monstrous serpent slain at Delphi)
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