Land-salamander
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A salamander (Order Caudata) that habitually or permanently lives its life on land.
"They think they can turn him into something rich and strange —turn him in a single generation—even as certain ingenious experimentalists turned what Nature meant for a land-salamander into a water-salamander, with new ruddertail and gills instead of lungs and feet suppressed, by feeding him with water animals in oxygenated water and cajoling his functions."
- 2 A name given to the terrestrial phase of a newt; eft.
Example
More examples"They think they can turn him into something rich and strange —turn him in a single generation—even as certain ingenious experimentalists turned what Nature meant for a land-salamander into a water-salamander, with new ruddertail and gills instead of lungs and feet suppressed, by feeding him with water animals in oxygenated water and cajoling his functions."
Etymology
From land + salamander. Compare Dutch landsalamander, German Landsalamander.
More for "land-salamander"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.