Ophiophagous

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. feeding on or consuming snakes as food
2. subsisting primarily on serpents as a dietary source
3. preying upon and eating snakes as a nutritional sustenance

Etymology: "Ophiophagous" is built from two Greek elements: "ophio-", from "ophis" meaning "snake", and "-phagous", from "phagos" meaning "eating". Put together they describe any creature that eats snakes, most famously the king cobra, which preys on other snakes and is itself among the few animals that will do so routinely. The second element is the familiar one. It appears in "sarcophagous" and in "anthropophagous" (man-eating), and it shares its root with the Greek verb "phagein", "to eat", which gave English words like "esophagus". The pattern is a classical formation: Greek roots combined to name a specific diet, a useful habit in natural history writing where precise descriptions of feeding were needed.