Definitions

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

  • noun Any of various venomous snakes of the family Elapidae, such as the cobras, mambas, and coral snakes, having hollow, fixed fangs.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A serpent of the family Elapidæ.

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

  • noun a venomous snake of the family Elapidae, including the .

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

  • noun biology Any of many species of snakes, of the family Elapidae, including the cobras, mambas, and coral snakes
  • adjective Characteristic of these snakes

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

  • noun any of numerous venomous fanged snakes of warmer parts of both hemispheres

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From New Latin Elapidae, family name, from Late Greek elaps, elap-, fish, variant of Greek ellops.]

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Examples

Comments

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  • ""Clive—the junior Clive and not the senior Clive who is presently chopping his way through the Amazon jungle—fears that I will go and tangle myself up with that fugitive elapid. They think I'm daft sometimes, these Pellers. Now I ask you, young man: if I were so precipitant as to go draping myself with poisonous fugitive elapids, would I have survived even half of my ninety-four years? Dear me. Now you are but a boy. Do you know what the word 'precipitant' means?""

    Under the Harrow by Mark Dunn, p 153

    September 3, 2011