Snakes

How to spell snakes

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce snakes

What does snakes mean?

1. nounMore than one legless reptile of the kind that slithers along the ground.
2. verbMoves or extends in a long, winding, twisting line.

Snakes in a sentence

• noun

  The reptile house kept several venomous snakes behind thick glass.

• verb

  The mountain road snakes between the cliffs for several miles.

• noun

  Warm rocks attract snakes that bask in the afternoon sun.

• verb

  A narrow path snakes through the dense forest toward the lake.

Where does snakes come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English snaca, the native Anglo-Saxon name for the legless reptile, and it shares deep Germanic roots with words in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. The underlying ancient root carried the sense of 'to crawl' or 'to creep', which is exactly how a snake moves across the ground, and that same creeping idea is why we still speak of a road or river 'snaking' through a landscape. For centuries an alternative native word, 'serpent', borrowed from Latin, competed with it, but 'snake' kept its everyday footing in plain English. The spelling is reassuringly regular: the silent final 'e' lengthens the vowel, and the plural simply adds 's'. Because the base ends in the 'k' sound, the 's' is voiced as a 'z' when spoken, yet it is always written with a plain 's'.

How the word is built

• snake (Old English snaca: a crawling reptile)
• -s (plural / third-person verb marker)