boa constrictor

Unadapted borrowing from New Latin Boa constrictor.

boa constrictor (plural boa constrictors)

1. A large tropical American snake, Boa constrictor, that kills its prey by squeezing them.
   • 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:

     After him followed a blesbok, then an impala, then a koodoo, then more goats, and many other animals, including a girl sewn up in the shining scaly hide of a boa-constrictor, several yards of which trailed along the ground behind her.

2. (loosely) Any large python.
   • 1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 95:

     We found boa constrictors or pythons, whip snakes, the handsome but deadly tiger snake, so called from the peculiar marks on its skin[.]

• The boa constrictor is the only extant animal whose English common name is the same as its scientific (taxonomic) name. Tyrannosaurus rex, an extinct species, also shares this phenomenon.