Serpent

How to spell serpent

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce serpent

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does serpent mean?

1. nounA snake, especially a large one, often used in a literary, mythological, or biblical context.

Serpent in a sentence

• The carved serpent coiled around the temple pillar fascinated the tourists.

• In the old story, a cunning serpent tempts the first humans in the garden.

Where does serpent come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin serpens, the present participle of the verb serpere, which literally meant 'to creep' or 'to crawl'. A serpent was therefore named simply as 'the creeping thing', a vivid description of how a snake moves along the ground. The same ancient root (related to the Greek herpein, 'to creep', which also gives us 'herpes') points back to a shared Indo-European word for crawling motion. English borrowed the term through Old French in the 1200s, where it kept the spelling 'serpent', and it long carried a literary and biblical flavour, famously naming the tempter in the Garden of Eden. The clean spelling rarely traps writers, since each sound maps neatly onto its letters; the only soft spot is the unstressed second vowel, which is reduced to a faint 'uh' and could tempt a writer toward an 'a' or 'i'.

How the word is built

• serp- (from Latin serpere: to creep, crawl)
• -ent (present-participle suffix, 'the creeping one')