viper
/ˈvʌɪpə
/noun
1A venomous snake with large hinged fangs, typically having a broad head and stout body, with dark patterns on a lighter background.
- Family Viperidae: numerous genera and species. See also pit viper, adder1.
- While human encounters with cobras, vipers, and pythons can prove fatal, more often than not it is the snakes that are killed.
- The dexterity with which the charmers handle deadly snakes such as cobras and vipers has added to the allure of the street-side performances.
1.1A spiteful or treacherous person.Did we have idiots regulating morons or mice monitoring vipers?...
- I surrounded myself with vipers in human bodies.
- Which may be why the vipers in the political snake pit are rattling their rattles and baring those long, curved fangs.
Phrases
viper in one's bosom
Derivatives
viperine
- Hers is the most determined fall into degradation, epitomized by the viperine smile that simmers on her lips after her final abasement for a fix.
- In view of its precarious status, removal of viperine snakes from breeding pools should continue to be part of the population management strategy for this endangered amphibian.
- I took this photo of a viperine snake last August at midday on a shaded stone wall just outside a village in Northern Navarra.
viperish
- Surely, people are more scared of you and your viperish tongue?
- Occasionally she even demonstrates some viperish spirit, as when she traded insults with another model.
- Considering they're cousins I've never seen a more viperish attack of sibling rivalry ever.
viperous
- Now we face the least appealing of the evening's ever-shifting alternatives - marching eight miles through viperous wastes, past a frontier checkpoint, to the nearest outpost of the border patrol.
- When the Commission finds in her husband's favour, she has to watch her poisoner pardoned, freed and fêted as a popular celebrity, while she faces an increasingly viperous press, and is jeered at and spat on in the streets.
- It was a peaceful town till about a year ago when some viperous barbarian started slaughtering folks.
viperlike
Origin
Early 16th century: from French vipère or Latin vipera, from vivus 'alive' + parere 'bring forth'.
Some vipers give birth to live young which have hatched from eggs within the parent's body, whereas the eggs of most snakes are laid before they hatch. The name viper derives from the fact they are viviparous (‘producing live young’ M17th), coming from Latin vivus ‘alive’, as in vivisection (early 18th century), and parere ‘to bring forth’, the source of parent (Late Middle English). The phrase a viper in your bosom, ‘a person you have helped but who has behaved treacherously towards you’, comes from one of Aesop's fables in which a viper reared close to a person's chest eventually bites its nurturer. See also adder, snake