A newt is a small animal with a long soft body, four short legs, and a tail. It lives partly in water and partly on land, like a frog, so it is an amphibian, not a lizard — though it looks a little like one, and its skin is not dry and scaly. You often find newts in ponds in spring. The name has a slightly silly history: English once had a word like ewt, from Old English efete, a lizard or newt. People said an ewt, and the n from an stuck to the animal, so it became a newt. The same kind of split gave us adder and apron. The older word eft is a doublet — the same animal under a shorter name, still heard in some local speech. You do not need that story to use the word. Just do not call a house lizard or a gecko a newt.