coil around

coil around (someone or something)

To twist around someone or something. A reflexive pronoun can be used between "coil" and "around." The explorer froze when he felt the snake coil itself around his leg. That vine is now coiling around the tree—is there any way I can move it? I nearly panicked when I felt something coil itself around my ankle, but it was just an untied shoelace, thank goodness.
See also: around, coil
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2024 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.

coil (itself) around someone or something

[for something or an animal] to wrap itself around someone or something. The monkey's tail coiled itself around the branch. The huge python coiled around poor Roger.
See also: around, coil
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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References in periodicals archive ?
Experts said the species are not poisonous but are constrictors, meaning they can coil around their prey and kill them through constriction or strangulation.
These pythons are not poisonous but can coil around and kill a person.
The salps are connected in a chain that starts as a coil around the solitary salp's gut.
Translucent orange-brown bones coil around a squashed skull, and a lanky body stretches into a short, curving tail.
A good way to tell if your clay is moist enough is to roll a coil the size of your finger and then wrap that coil around your finger.
That's not enough for me, he said, and will say again when the cancer comes back to coil around his belly and squeeze hard like a python set free and starving in the swamp.
Watching him tighten his evil coil around Lesgate, by slowly disclosing everything he knows about him, is delectably pleasurable.
"My hair got caught in the wheels of my spinning peppermint bra and began to coil around and around.
Females coil around the eggs to protect them and keep them warm through using muscular contractions to generate heat.
of wire random-wound in a one-way coil around a cardboard former.
The collection includes dainty, jewel-encrusted snakes which coil around fingers, wrists or dangle around the necks of both children and adults.
python Any of various nonvenomous snakes of the family Pythonidae, found chiefly in Asia, Africa, and Australia, that coil around and suffocate their prey.
The hoses of the hookahs coil around the lavish water pipes like a nest of serpents while the alluring Arabic music all but charms them from their perches.
her hands, that steady, her hair, self-contained in a coil around her