Definition of "water snake" []

• Any of various nonvenomous snakes of the genus Natrix, living in or frequenting freshwater streams and ponds. (noun)
• Any of various aquatic or semiaquatic snakes. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Piemur might have avoided both numbweed stench and water snake puncture, but he certainly worked as hard beside Sharra, as he had that one day in Nabol Hold, a day that seemed to belong to another boy entirely, not this one that was alternately soaked and dried to parchment as they harvested the precious fruits of the swamp grass."
• "The slow-water sections were inhospitable, at least partly because those sections harbored a larger species of water snake that preyed upon N. h. paucimaculata."
• "Piemur didn't believe that water snakes could grow that big, but he had to credit her warning when she showed him the fine band of puncture marks on her left arm where a water snake had wound its coils and left the myriad points of its toe-teeth."