Brewer's: Echidna

(E-kid'-na). Half-woman, half-serpent. She was mother of the Chimæra, the many-headed dog Orthos, the hundred-headed dragon of the Hesperides, the Colchian dragon, the Sphinx, Cerberos, Scylla, the Gorgons, the Lernæan hydra, the vulture that gnawed away the liver of Prometheus, and the Nemean lion.

(Hesiod.)

[She] seemed a woman to the waist, and fair But ended foul in many a scaly fold, Voluminous and vast.

Milton:Paradise Lost, book ii. 650-2.

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