I’m looking for a word or a phrase for describing this kind of road which usually is constructed in the mountain areas, but not only:
image a representative sample from Google images, query = transfagarasan
In my language we call this serpentine a word used as a noun (not adjective) to describe its shape.
If I wanted to write an article about this road, a road constructed in the mountains provided with many turns and angles like in the above link, which word would be more appropriate to use?
Answer
Preface ADDED 14 Jan/Jan 14, 00:11 GMT/UTC: This answer, as the OP Lucian Sava is well aware, has been written from an AmE perspective. Actually, it is written from the perspective of the variety of AmE that I speak. I think Lucian gets by now that English usage is not universal, as I had already indicted in my anwer. Let the conversation continue, by all means!
Serpentine is fine, but in English I am pretty sure we would use it as an adjective describing the road. Such a road is also called, in familiar terms, a curvy mountain road. More technically, it is any road that contains many switchbacks or hairpin curves
Switchback can refer to entirety of such a road. But this may not reflect universal usage.
I think serpentine (adjective) would be the more universally recognized word.
You can do an image search for both "switchback road" and "serpentine road" and get many of the same images.
Thus saith the snake:
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