Snake

How to spell snake

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce snake

What does snake mean?

1. nounA long, legless reptile with a scaly body.
2. verbTo move or extend in a long, winding course.

Snake in a sentence

• noun

  A green snake slid silently through the tall grass.

• verb

  The queue began to snake around the corner of the building.

• noun

  The zoo keeper fed a live mouse to the snake.

• verb

  The narrow road will snake through the mountains for miles.

Where does snake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends directly from the Old English snaca, the native name for the legless reptile, and it has stayed remarkably close to its original form for over a thousand years. The Old English term came from a Proto-Germanic root that linguists reconstruct as snak-, carrying the basic idea of 'to crawl' or 'to creep', which neatly captures how the animal moves. Related forms survive in other Germanic languages, including the Old Norse snakr and the modern Swedish snok for a harmless grass snake. The same creeping notion sits behind the verb 'to sneak', a cousin built on the same family of crawling words. The figurative sense of a 'snake' as a treacherous or disloyal person is much older than it feels, appearing in English from at least the 1500s, and the spelling has remained simple and phonetic throughout.

How the word is built

• snake (from Old English snaca, a creeping reptile); single root, no affixes