anaconda

n.
Either of two nonvenomous, semiaquatic snakes (Eunectes murinus or E. noteus) of tropical South America that kill their prey by suffocating it in their coils. E. murinus, the giant anaconda, can attain lengths from 5 to 9 meters (16.4 to 29.5 feet).

[Perhaps alteration of Sinhalese henakandayā, whip snake.]

For more information on anaconda, visit Britannica.com.

from Sinhala
This word originated in Sri Lanka

Boa o boa! You wouldn't want to exchange hugs with an anaconda. Your lifespan would be constricted--not to mention your ribcage. That's how an anaconda prepares you for dinner; it sinks its teeth into you, then wraps itself around your chest so tightly you can't inhale to shout "Down, boa."

It's the terror of the Amazon, or at least of the Amazon as depicted in the 1997 movie Anaconda, where special-effects imitation anacondas writhe and gobble up the bad guys and some of the good. South America is its only native habitat. But it has a name from the other side of the world, from the Sinhala language of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon. How come?

The Oxford English Dictionary provides us with a reasonable explanation, namely, that it was a mistake. At first, the name from Ceylon was properly applied to a snake from Ceylon. In 1693, in a list of snakes from India in the Leyden (Holland) Museum, the Englishman John Ray wrote of "anacandaia of the Ceylonese, i.e. he that crushes the limbs of the buffaloes and yoke beasts." And for more than a hundred years afterwards, in English eyes, the anaconda was indeed a resident of Ceylon. But nineteenth-century experts unaccountably began using the same name for the snake residing in the Amazon basin. An 1849 British Museum Catalogue of Snakes lists "The Ancondo, Eunectes murimus ... Brazil ... Tropical America."

There are indeed constrictor snakes in Sri Lanka. Schoolchildren in a remote part of the country even found a double-headed one in 1997. Since the nineteenth century, however, the constrictors of Sri Lanka and elsewhere in Asia have been called pythons, a name the ancient Greeks used for a mythical monster.

Sinhala is the national language of Sri Lanka, spoken by more than thirteen million people there. Like English, it is a member of the far-flung Indo-European language family; Sinhala belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch along with Hindi, Urdu, and Romani. One other word from Sinhala that is known in English is ambarella, not a special kind of umbrella but a tropical tree with an egg-shaped yellow fruit also called the Otaheita apple.

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The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: large arboreal boa of tropical South America
  Synonym: Eunectes murinus

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