elephantine
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /ɛl.əˈfæn.tin/
ipa: /ɛl.əˈfæn.taɪn/
ipa: /ˈɛl.ə.fən.tin/
ipa: /ˈɛl.ə.fən.taɪn/
Forms: form: more elephantine
form: most elephantine
Etymology: From Latin elephantīn(us). By surface analysis, elephant + -ine.
Senses: examples: text: The scene around them was currently plunged into gloom. Dark mists swirled round them and elephantine shapes lurked indistinctly in the shadows.
ref: 1979, Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, →ISBN, page 132:
text: This last summer Hanecki had captured Lenin’s imagination with his plans to found a trading company of his own in Europe, or take a partnership in some existing firm and make guaranteed monthly remittances to the Party out of his profits. This was not a Russian pipe dream: every move had been worked out with impressive precision. Kuba hadn’t thought of it himself, it was the brainchild of the elephantine genius Parvus, who had been writing to him from Constantinople. Parvus, once as poor as any other Social Democrat, had gone to Turkey to organize strikes, and now wrote frankly that he had all the money he needed (if rumor was right, he was fabulously wealthy) and that the time had come for the Party too to get rich.
ref: 1989, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by H. T. Willetts, August 1914, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, page 179:
synonyms: elephantesque
elephantic
elephantish
elephantlike
elephanty
glosses: Of, relating to, resembling, or characteristic of elephants.
examples: text: He comes into Brewer from the south, seeing it in the smoky shadow before dawn as a gradual multiplication of houses among the trees beside the road and then as a treeless waste of industry, shoe factories and bottling plants and company parking lots and knitting mills converted to electronics parts and elephantine gas tanks lifting above trash-filled swampland yet lower than the blue edge of the mountain from whose crest Brewer was a warm carpet woven around a single shade of brick.
ref: 1960, John Updike, 'Rabbit, Run', page 35:
text: Ugly, clumsy and far from silent, with elephantine point mechanisms at the car sheds, it nevertheless works and has been brought up to date electrically for further public service.
ref: 1964 July, “The mythology of monorails”, in Modern Railways, page 1:
text: At one level, that may mean tailoring services to demand and introducing vehicles that are genuinely lighter in weight. At another, calculating the energy and emissions of track renewal - whether steel rail, concrete sleepers or mining ballast, crushing, shipping using dirty fuel, and re-handling it before finally placing and maintaining with diesel equipment. And then shortening its life though the wear and tear of tamping to counter the effect of elephantine passenger vehicles.
ref: 2020 May 6, Prof. Andrew McNaughton, “Time to challenge some sacred philosophies of recent years”, in Rail, pages 32, 34:
synonyms: word: ample
word: big
word: bodacious
word: broad
word: commodious
word: considerable
word: expansive
word: good-sized
word: full
word: generous
word: giant
word: grand
word: great
word: hefty
word: hench
word: immense
word: jumbo
word: larger than life
word: largifical
word: leviathan
word: long
word: massive
word: mega-
word: overlarge
word: outsized
word: oversize
word: oversized
word: prodigious
word: roomy
word: rotund
word: sizeable
word: spacious
word: stonking
word: tall
word: vast
word: voluminous
word: wide
word: astronomic
word: behemothic
word: big fat
word: boxcar
word: Brobdingnagian
word: bulky
word: colossal
word: cyclopean
word: Daniel Lambertish
word: elephantine
word: elephantic
word: enormous
word: gargantuan
word: giantesque
word: gigantesque
word: gigantic
word: ginormous
word: great big
word: honkin'
word: huge
word: hulking
word: humongous
word: hunormous
word: immane
word: mahoosive
word: mammoth
word: mastodonic
word: monstrous
word: monumental
word: mountainous
word: pantagruelian
word: pyramidal
word: Pythonic
word: stupendous
word: super-
word: supersized
word: titanic
word: tremendous
word: whopping
word: yuge
glosses: Very large.
Derived terms: elephantine epoch
elephantine leprosy
elephantine tortoise
Related terms: hippopotamine
rhinocerine