Elephantine
adj, name, noun ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 Any member of the subfamily Elephantinae of elephants and their extinct close relatives.
- 1 Of, relating to, resembling, or characteristic of elephants.
"The scene around them was currently plunged into gloom. Dark mists swirled round them and elephantine shapes lurked indistinctly in the shadows."
- 2 Of, from, or pertaining to Elephantine or the Elephantine people. not-comparable
- 3 Very large.
"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."
- 1 of great mass; huge and bulky wordnet
- 1 An island in the river Nile, and the ancient city that occupied it.
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"The scene around them was currently plunged into gloom. Dark mists swirled round them and elephantine shapes lurked indistinctly in the shadows."
Etymology
From Latin elephantīn(us). By surface analysis, elephant + -ine.
From Ancient Greek Ἐλεφαντίνη (Elephantínē).
Related phrases
More for "elephantine"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.