Python
name, noun, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 Any member of the comedy troupe Monty Python: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones or Michael Palin. informal
"John Cleese is perhaps the best-known of the Pythons."
- 2 Any of the family Pythonidae of nonvenomous constrictor snakes.
- 3 large Old World boas wordnet
- 4 A penis. slang, vulgar
- 5 a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language for computers created by Guido van Rossum wordnet
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- 6 a soothsaying spirit or a person who is possessed by such a spirit wordnet
- 1 The earth-dragon of Delphi, represented as a serpent, killed by Apollo. Greek
"Here Apollo killed a serpent called the Python, and established a great prophetic shrine. Sometimes it is said that the Titaness Themis had the shrine before him, and this, as well as the killing of the Python, suggests that Apollo took over a place already of religious significance, associated with chthonic (i.e., earth) powers."
- 2 An interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language invented by Guido van Rossum.
Example
More examples"GCC is a compiler while Python is an interpreter."
Etymology
From Ancient Greek Πύθων (Púthōn), from Πῡθώ (Pūthṓ), the early name of Delphi, from πύθω (púthō, “to rot, to decay”). The programming language is named after Monty Python.
From Latin pȳthon, from Ancient Greek Πύθων (Púthōn), the name of the mythological enormous serpent at Delphi slain by Apollo, probably from Πυθώ (Puthṓ), older name of Delphi.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.