An eft grew an N and became newt
Newts are salamanders of subfamily Pleurodelinae, semiaquatic unlike many cousins; their land-juvenile stage is an eft. Not every water-loving salamander earns the name. Old English efte became eft, then—by joining with the article an—picked up an n by the early 1400s to yield newt.
Habitat loss, fragmentation, and pollution pressure many species; some are endangered, and the Yunnan lake newt has been treated as extinct since 1979. Alternating aquatic and terrestrial seasons defines the classic newt lifestyle within Salamandridae.
Dialect history is almost as twisty as the animals’ metamorphosis: Middle English eft warped through euft and ewt before Staffordshire variants helped lock newt. Mis-segmenting an eft gifted English an extra consonant.
Dialect English and Scots also used ask for both newts and wall lizards, from an Old English word whose Germanic root has been read as lizard-badger. Older books called newts Tritones after the sea god Triton, a name Tschudi made formal alongside Pleurodelinae in 1838, and triton survives in Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Greek and Russian. A group of newts can be called a flotilla or an armada. More than 100 species live across North America, Europe, North Africa and Asia, but North America has only the Pacific newts and Eastern newts, seven species between them; Europe and the Middle East are the likely cradle.
Most breed in ponds, ditches or flooded meadows, though the Danube crested newt also uses slow rivers, and the Northern Hemisphere breeding peak falls in June and July. A female warty newt can lay 200 to 300 eggs, and over the following months larvae grow legs and trade gills for lungs. Injured tissue can regenerate because cells at the wound revert to an unspecialised state. The rough-skinned newt of the Pacific Northwest carries enough tetrodotoxin to kill an adult human. The subfamily probably arose between the Late Cretaceous and the Eocene, and adult crested newts breathe mostly through their skin.
Source: Newt
