boa constrictor

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A large boa (Boa constrictor) of tropical America that has dark brown markings on a lighter background and kills its prey by constriction.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A name popularly applied to any large serpent of the family Boidæ or Pythonidæ: same as boa, 2.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• (Zoöl.) A large and powerful serpent of tropical America, sometimes twenty or thirty feet long. See Illustration in Appendix.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A large tropical American snake, Boa constrictor, that kills its prey by squeezing them

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun very large boa of tropical America and West Indies