C. vagitus is a terrestrial frog and lacks the arboreal appendages of the similar genus Litoria.

The name is related to the Latin noun vagitus, "crying, squalling, wailing," particularly by a baby or an animal, and the verb vagio, vagire.

Natus igitur puerulus palpitabat et mamillarum maternarum quaerens solacia lamentabiles dabat vagitus.

The name Vaticanus in connection to vagitus is discussed by Aulus Gellius and Augustine of Hippo.

Cyclorana vagitus, the Wailing Frog, is a tree frog occupying the arid and monsoonal Kimberley (Western Australia) region.

Vagitanus has been connected to a remark by Pliny that only a human being is thrown naked onto the naked earth on his day of birth for immediate wails (vagitus) and weeping.

Despite the insistence on an etymological connection between the god's name and vagitus, Gronovius thought the correct form should be Vaticanus, and that Vagitanus was Vulgar Latin rather than classical.

The labor is difficult and long, and it may get worse before the vagitus is heard, but don't despair over the Middle East: something great, something wondrous, something completely unimaginable is there aborning.

It consists of the sound of "an instant of recorded vagitus" (a birth-cry), followed by an amplified recording of somebody slowly inhaling and exhaling accompanied by an increase and decrease in the intensity of the light.

If the former, the indigitamenta might be described as indexing "significant names which bespoke a specialized divine function," for which the German term Sondergötter is sometimes used; for instance, Vagitanus gives the newborn its first cry (vagitus).

V is for Vagitus (The Cry of a Newborn Baby) (directed and written by Kaare Andrews) In a futuristic New Vancouver in 2035, women are made infertile by the government but can earn back their fertility through service to Propagation Control.

Varro (1st century BC) connected it to a Deus Vaticanus or Vagitanus, a Roman deity thought to endow infants with the capacity for speech evidenced by their first wail (vagitus, the first syllable of which is pronounced wa in Classical Latin).