Heffalump

//ˈhɛfəlʌmp// noun, slang

noun, slang ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    (A child's name for) an elephant. childish, humorous

    "We went to the zoo and saw some heffalumps."

  2. 2
    Alternative letter-case form of heffalump. alt-of

    "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 [...]."

  3. 3
    Something that is elusive. figuratively, informal

    "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 [...]."

  4. 4
    A clumsy or overweight person. derogatory, slang

    "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."

Synonyms

All synonyms
all are derogatory unless otherwise labeledbutterballchubbschubsterchunkerchunky monkey

Example

More examples

"We went to the zoo and saw some heffalumps."

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.

Related phrases

heffalump trapwinnie pooh

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.