Old English snaca, of Germanic origin.

• Snakes take their name from the fact that they have no legs and crawl along the ground. The ancestor of snake is an ancient Germanic word that meant ‘to crawl or creep’. Serpent (Middle English) has a similar origin—it comes from Latin serpere, which also meant ‘to crawl or creep’. Yet another word with this original sense was Old English slink. You can describe a treacherous person as a snake in the grass, with the idea of a lurking danger. Snakes are associated with treachery not only in Genesis but in the 6th century bc fables of the Greek storyteller Aesop. In one of his stories a man finds a snake frozen with cold and puts it close to his chest to warm it up. As soon as the snake revives it bites him (see also viper). Before the 17th century the equivalent phrase had featured toads, which were at one time thought to be poisonous—a treacherous person was called a pad in the straw (pad is an old dialect word for a toad). The current expression may have originated from a Latin poem by the Roman poet Virgil. The children's game Snakes and Ladders, called in the USA Chutes and Ladders, was first played at the end of the 19th century. It may be based on an ancient Indian game called Moksha Patamu, which was used to teach children about the Hindu religion—the good squares allowed a player to go to a higher level of life, whereas the evil ‘snakes’ sent them back through reincarnation to lower tiers of life.