Dragons: Introduction

Nearly every culture has myths about something called a "dragon", despite the fact none of them can agree on exactly what dragons are.
How big are they? What do they look like? How many heads do they have? Do they breathe fire? Or ice? Do they fly (and if so, with or without wings)? How many legs do they have? Are they dumb as planks, or superintelligent? Are they low scaly pests, or ultra-rare Uber-serpents ancient and powerful as the Earth itself? Are they benevolent? Malevolent or even outright demonic? Are they divine entities or spirits, or just really cool animals? They could even be aliens in some works of fiction.

Common Abilities

1. Fire Breath or some other kind of breath attack
2. Flight
3. Magic

Variants

• hydra
• lindworm
• wyvern
• wyrm
• and many more

Besides those two categorizations mentioned above, dragons also have many different variants. Some appear in mythology and folklore, others are a more recent invention.

The most popular variation has been the wyvern, which resembles a bat, with clawed wings as forelimbs and two legs for hind limbs.
Rivaling the wyvern is the Hydra from Greek Mythology, which is often depicted as a flightless dragon-like water or swamp beast with one or more heads; for each head you cut off, two rapidly grow to replace it.
A drake is usually a creature related to dragons but smaller and less intelligent, equivalent to the relationship between humans and chimpanzees. More likely than dragons to come in multiple varieties adapted to different environments (e.g. the drakes that live around volcanos may be the only ones able to breathe fire). What they look like is variable, but most often they're differentiated from true dragons by having small or nonexistent wings; other examples might have a winged but two-legged body plan similar to wyverns. In some cases "drake" is simply an alternate name for dragons, or refers to young or male dragons in particular.
Very old (Greco-Roman, and a few medieval cultures such as Germanic-Nordic) dragons are presented as more serpentine than the more recent ones, if winged, the wings are usually their only limbs; and some were totally limbless, just enormous serpents. This type of dragon may be referred to as a wyrm (pronounced "worm"). Sometimes, however, "wyrm" will refer to a different type of dragon, or to particularly old and powerful ones, or may simply be a synonym for dragons in general.
Occasionally, winged but legless dragons may be referred to as amphipteres instead, a name derived from a kind of winged serpents traditionally used in French heraldry.
Another variant from heraldry is the lindwurm, a two-legged dragon with no other limbs. Variants include dragons that are armless bipeds or basically snakes with arms.

The wani are a type largely exclusive to Japan and nearby islands. Resembling some combination of a crocodile and/or shark, they often fit the class of a dangerous, powerful sea monster.
The imugi are largely exclusive to Korea, but similar myths do exist in Northern China. Largely resembling gigantic serpents, often water snakes or pythons, imugi are sort of a "proto-dragon".
The naga are found across central and southeastern Asia, into the Philipines, and can come in a wide variety of forms. The term has become a bit of an umbrella term, especially in English, but in broad strokes naga tend to be serpentine. Sometimes this means resembling gigantic snakes, other times the serpents have horns and fangs to give them a more draconic look, some have multiple heads, and others might be shapeshifters who can change their upper half to resemble a human.

Other reptilian or avian mixed mythological creatures, particularly the Sea Serpent, Basilisk, Cockatrice, and Quetzalcoatl, may be considered types of dragons or similar creatures in some works.

The commonalities between the different dragons' traits are often a hybridization of reptilian, mammalian, and avian features.

Etymology

The word "dragon" entered the English language in the early 13th century from Old French dragon, which, in turn, comes from the Latin draco, meaning "huge serpent, dragon." Draco comes from the Ancient Greek word drakon, with the literal meaning of "one who stares" or "sharp-sighted". The Greek and Latin terms referred to any great serpent, not necessarily a mythological one.

Eastern languages tend to refer to them using different names (Japanese, for instance, refers to Western dragons as doragon and to Eastern ones as ryu or tatsu), and they are generally less interchangeable. Chinese dragons are referred to as long, with their regional variant in Korea being ryong and the aforementioned ryu in Japan.

History

TBA