heffalump
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: simple
Etymology: Probably a childish mispronunciation of elephant, perhaps influenced by half a lump (as in "I'll have half a lump of sugar in my tea"), coined by the English author Alan Alexander Milne (1882–1956) as the name of an imaginary animal in his book Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). The animal was not described in the book, but the illustrator Ernest Howard Shepard (1879–1976) depicted it as an elephant.
Sense 2 (“something which is elusive”) refers to the fact that in Milne’s book the characters Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet set a trap for, but are unable to capture, a heffalump.
Inflected forms:
form: heffalumps
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: Heffalump
pos: noun
tags: alternative
Senses:
gloss: (A child's name for) an elephant.
pos: noun
tags: childish
humorous
examples: We went to the zoo and saw some heffalumps.
Mrs. Jumbo stood at the door with the baby heffalump in her arms. She waved a large blue handkerchief and heffalump waved his little white paws. "Goodbye, Daddy Jumbo, Goodbye" they cried. "Goodbye Mummy Jumbo, goodbye baby heffalump."
From time to time to time, bones clearly recognized as those of elephants have been found in the North Temperate Zone. In Western Europe the explanation always was, "These are the remains of the army-elephants of Hannibal the Carthaginian." […
Yeees, we're going to the zoo to see animals. There are lions and tiggers and snakes and heffalumps.
In the "Heffalumps and Woozles" ditty from Winnie the Pooh, elephants—those would be the heffalumps—wear tuxedos and use their trunks as accordions and suddenly turn blue. Fantastical, to be sure, but it's downright unimaginative compared to what European natural historians used to believe about the elephant: That it has no knees and it can't have sex until it eats the ridiculously toxic mandrake root, and even when it successfully mates, dragons eat its baby.
gloss: Something that is elusive.
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
informal
examples: With the study in this chapter, we continue the hunt for the Heffalump to answer the 'who is the entrepreneur' question [...]. The Heffalump is a character from Winnie-the-Pooh that has been hunted by many individuals using various ingenious trapping devices, but no one has succeeded in capturing it so far. All who claim to have caught sight of it report that it is enormous, but they disagree on its particularities [...].
In fact, some researchers are skeptical about the feasibility of constructing such an index and describe it as a "search for [a] heffalump" [...] or looking for a "Holy Grail" [...].
gloss: A clumsy or overweight person.
pos: noun
tags: derogatory
slang
examples: Violet, under the auspices of Jacques-Yves Cabillaud, had been continuing to expand her childish girth. At two she had already been pronounced a heffalump; by seven, she was the size and shape of a barrel.
As I sat in my Virgin seat, I spotted an enormous fat bloke waddling towards me and thought: Please, God, not him. There's nothing worse than sitting next to a heaving heffalump on an 11-hour flight, not least because they eat all the best food.
'Seven-thirty, then,' she agreed, because for some perverse reason she wanted to go home after her surgery, shower and change into something—well, something else. Something pretty. Something that didn't make her feel like a heffalump.
Every time Chloe met Natalia she felt like some lumbering heffalump compared to the diminutive but full-chested South American beauty who had perfect chocolate brown hair, matching eyes and permanently tanned skin.
'What are you, thumping around like fucking heffalumps? The twins are trying to get to sleep,' he says, staring at us on the bed.
They're bound to be whoppers, aren't they, competitive eaters? Lard-buckets. Human dumpsters. Mega-heffalumps. Not at all. This hard-to-swallow documentary comes to show us that top-class scoffers are actually athletes, not only fit but thinner than average.
With cars getting bigger and heavier, there’s a proper thirst for four-wheel-steering to help hide heffalumps and make fast cars faster – 4WS is a useful way of killing two birds with one stone.
Derived words: heffalump trap
Translations: