Newt

How to spell newt

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce newt

What does newt mean?

1. nounA small, slender amphibian with a long tail, related to the salamander, that lives partly in water and partly on land.

Newt in a sentence

• The biology students found a newt under a damp log near the pond.

• A great crested newt is a protected species across much of Britain.

Where does newt come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Newt is a small tailed amphibian, and its name is a charming accident of mishearing. The Old English word was efeta, which became Middle English 'ewte' or 'evete', a name for the same little creature. In speech, people kept saying 'an ewte', and over time the 'n' of the article migrated across to the noun, so 'an ewte' was reinterpreted as 'a newte'. This kind of shift, where a word gains or loses an initial 'n' through confusion with the article, is called rebracketing or metanalysis; the reverse process gave us 'an apron' from the older 'a napron' and 'an umpire' from 'a numpire'. The spelling settled as 'newt' by the fifteenth century, which is why the word looks deceptively simple yet has no obvious root: the leading 'n' was never originally part of it.

How the word is built

• newt (single root; historically a re-divided form of 'an ewt', from Old English efeta)