Tortoise harks back to the Latin tortus, meaning twisted (hence our word tortuous) and came to be applied to these slow creatures because of their twisted legs. In its evolution through many tongues it has suffered numbers of variations; one of these being turtle, which we use to-day to designate the smaller land tortoises. Terrapin and its old forms terrapene and turpin, on the contrary, originated in the New World, in the language of the American Redskin.
Cobra-de-capello is Portuguese for hooded snake, while python is far older, the same word being used by the Greeks to denote a spirit, demon, or evil-soothsayer. This name was really given to designate any species of large serpent. Boa is Latin and was also applied to a large snake, while the importance of the character of size is seen, perhaps, in our words bos and bovine.
The word viper is interesting; coming directly from the Romans, who wrote it vipera. This in turn is a contraction of the feminine form of the adjective vivipera, in reference to the habit of these snakes of bringing forth their young alive.
Lizard, through such forms as lesarde, lezard, lagarto, lacerto, is from the Latin lacertus, a lizard; while closely related is the word alligator by way of lagarto, aligarto, to alligator. The prefix may have arisen as a corruption of an article and a noun, as in the modern Spanish el lagarto,—a lizard.
Monitor is Latin for one who reminds, these lizards being so called because they are supposed to give warning of the approach of crocodiles. Asp can be carried back to the aspis of the Romans, no trace being found in the dim vistas of preceding tongues.
Gecko, the name of certain wall-hunting lizards, is derived from their croaking cry; while iguana is a Spanish name taken from the old native Haytian appellation biuana.
Of the word frog we know nothing, although through the medium of many languages it has had as thorough an evolution as in its physical life. We must also admit our ignorance in regard to toad, backward search revealing only tade, tode, ted, toode, and tadie, the root baffling all study. Polliwog and tadpole are delightfully easy. Old forms of polliwog are pollywig, polewiggle, and pollwiggle. This last gives us the clew to our spelling—pollwiggle, which, reversed and interpreted in a modern way, is wigglehead, a most appropriate name for these lively little black fellows. Tadpole is somewhat similar; toad-pole, or toad’s-head, also very apt when we think of these small-bodied larval forms.
Salamander, which is a Greek word of Eastern origin, was applied in the earliest times to a lizard considered to have the power of extinguishing fire. Newt has a strange history; originating in a wrong division of two words, “an ewte,” the latter being derived from eft, which is far more correct than newt, though in use now in only a few places. Few fishermen have ever thought of the interesting derivation of the names which they know so well. Of course there are a host of fishes named from a fancied resemblance to familiar terrestrial animals or other things; such as the catfish, and those named after the dog, hog, horse, cow, trunk, devil, angel, sun, and moon.
The word fish has passed through many varied forms since it was piscis in the old Latin tongue, and the same is true of shark and skate, which in the same language were carcharus and squatus. Trout was originally tructa, which in turn is lost in a very old Greek word, meaning eat or gnaw. Perch harks back to the Latin perca, and the Romans had it from the Greeks, among whom it meant spotted. The Romans said minutus when they meant small, and nowadays when we speak of any very small fish we say minnow. Alewife in old English was applied to the women, usually very stout dames, who kept alehouses. The corpulency of the fish to which the same term is given explains its derivation.
The pike is so named from the sharp, pointed snout and long, slim body, bringing to mind the old-time weapon of that name; while pickerel means doubly a little pike, the er and el (as in cock and cockerel) both being diminutives. Smelt was formerly applied to any small fish and comes, perhaps, from the Anglo-Saxon smeolt, which meant smooth—the smoothness and slipperiness of the fish suggesting the name.