Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Asp
/æsp/noun
A small venomous snake of Egypt and southern Europe.
The Greek roots
ἀσπίς
aspís
asp; round shield
Literally: “shield-snake”
Follow a root:ἀσπίς3 words
The story of the word
In Greek, ἀσπίς meant both a round shield and a venomous snake, and nobody has settled which came first or whether the two senses belong together at all. The snake was most likely the Egyptian cobra, whose spread hood may be the link. English had the word by the 1300s in Bible translations, where the asp lurks in the Psalms, and Shakespeare put one in the basket of figs that kills Cleopatra.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
Same family
aspichoplite
In a sentence
The asp in the museum's mosaic was picked out in three shades of green tesserae.