parseltongue
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.56 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
2
Syllables
11
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
A fictional language of snakes in the Harry Potter universe.
Example Sentences
- "Now I can't get this out of my head - them hissing and whispering at one another like they're speaking in parseltongue."
- "Slither around Santa Fe's Rattlesnake Museum while practicing your parseltongue."
- "“Parseltongue, that's what I need,” I murmured out loud as I brushed my teeth. A language for communicating with snakes."
- "As mentally-overloaded as I was from his lisp, his proud/condescending tone, and his rock-solid insult, I must have blacked out, because I don't remember what happened next. I'm still toying with the possibility that he was actually a wizard speaking parseltongue."
Etymology
Coined by British author and philanthropist J. K. Rowling in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998) as Parseltongue. J. K. Rowling stated that she based the term on an "old word for someone who has a problem with the mouth, like a hare lip".