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cottonmouth

[ kot-n-mouth ]

noun

, plural cot·ton·mouths [kot, -n-mouths, -mou, th, z].
  1. a venomous snake, Agkistrodon ( Ancistrodon ) piscivorus, of swamps in southeastern U.S., that grows to about 4 feet (1.2 meters).


cottonmouth

/ ˈkɒtənˌmaʊθ /

noun

  1. another name for the water moccasin
“Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged” 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012


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Word History and Origins

Origin of cottonmouth1

1825–35, Americanism; cotton + mouth, so called from the whiteness of its lips and mouth
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Example Sentences

Her second young-adult novel, A Snake Falls to Earth, is a coming-of-age fantasy-thriller that flips between the perspective of an asexual teenage Lipan Apache girl and a cottonmouth snake.

From Time

But then, mysteriously, they all contracted strange ailments: cottonmouth, headaches, and severe dehydration.

When suddenly approached the moccasin opens wide its white-lined mouth, and one then understands why it is called cottonmouth.

Joe Harmon was small and stout, a little round man with bushy eyebrows and the flabby face of a cottonmouth snake.

The named, American kinds of Agkistrodon currently are arranged as three species: the copperhead, the cantil and the cottonmouth.

All are of late Pleistocene Age and well within the present geographic range of the cottonmouth.

The average for the eastern cottonmouth obtained by Gloyd and Conant, however, was 137 ventrals in both sexes.

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