813: cobra and Words for 'Snake-like' Feb 28, 2017

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Plenty of taxonomical words end in '-ine'; the reason why was explored in yesterday's post which you can see here: Drug-names and Taxonomy. Some of these are quite well-known, such as 'canine' or 'feline', while some are less used such as 'colubrine', which meas 'snake-like'. You might also recognize this as being similar to 'cobra'. This observation would be correct, but while both of these come from the Latin, 'coluber', 'cobra' is not directly from Latin and was adopted from Portuguese. 'Colubrine' is not the only word for 'snakelike' either, and 'serpentine' from the Latin for 'slither', and 'ophidian' from Greek are also used, but not often.

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