How to Use elephantine in a Sentence

elephantine

adjective
  • He has an elephantine ego.
  • Growths the size of golf balls bulged out of his forearm and elephantine ankles.
    — Anchorage Daily News, 30 Dec. 2019
  • Growths the size of golf balls bulged out of his forearm and elephantine ankles.
    — Washington Post, 29 Dec. 2019
  • The smaller size of this fair suggests that all the elephantine fairs with hundreds of booths should become things of the past.
    — Jerry Saltz, Vulture, 12 May 2021
  • Perry’s soloing was a melodic, piercing howl atop the latter’s elephantine riff.
    — Marc Hirsh, BostonGlobe.com, 19 Apr. 2018
  • In the wet season, elephantine clouds roll in from the Congolese interior and the land glows with startling fecundity.
    — Outside Online, 18 May 2015
  • No Simpsons writer or showrunner has publicly commented on their elephantine source material.
    — David Reamer, Anchorage Daily News, 7 Dec. 2020
  • My book manuscript was due to my editor in less than a year, but marshaling my despondent, wildly bereft thoughts for the purposes of creative work seemed a hurdle too elephantine to overcome.
    — Rachel Vorona Cote, SELF, 18 Apr. 2019
  • Who could have guessed that a single City Council race would turn into an elephantine criminal inquiry that dragged on for years, at enormous cost, to absolutely no point whatsoever?
    — Jim Dwyer, New York Times, 7 Mar. 2017
  • Chusyd designed large adjustable bracelets and used lots of zip ties to secure the devices, which were also placed inside waterproof boxes and wrapped in several industrial-strength plastic bags to protect them from elephantine bathing habits.
    — Sara Harrison, Wired, 4 Feb. 2021
  • Trimming those 20 minutes may have been the more commercial decision and also the more palatable one for the festival, which has a history of reining in directors and their elephantine running times.
    — Justin Chang, latimes.com, 5 Apr. 2018
  • The final thing Heels’ second episode does solidify, though, is that in spite of the elephantine pressure to overexplain most of its characterization, there are the lovely little beats that arrive first.
    — Kathryn Vanarendonk, Vulture, 13 Aug. 2021
  • On one hand are the traditionalists and their elephantine memories, who cling to negative, decades-old impressions of pinotage the way former athletes cling to romantic idealizations of their long-ago glory days in sports.
    — Cathy Huyghe, Forbes, 24 May 2021
  • Eclectic traditionalism, remade on an elephantine scale, is the style of totalitarianism.
    — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, 6 Sep. 2025
  • The company has become elephantine in such a short time by offering customers the ability to make purchases and pay later, making money by charging merchants to utilize Klarna’s payment technology.
    — Alexandra Sternlicht, Forbes, 1 June 2021
  • Any attempt to resurrect the mammoth faces an elephantine gauntlet of challenges, including the DNA-shattering effects of frost and time, and the rather unhelpful reproductive tract of the eventual surrogate parent—the elephant.
    — Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 6 June 2012
  • Queen Kapiolani, Hawaii’s queen from 1874 to 1891, died on the land that became the site of the elephantine indoor/outdoor Hyatt Regency resort in Waikīkī, where Kumukahi was the cultural ambassador for a decade.
    — Matt Negrin, Rolling Stone, 20 Sep. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'elephantine.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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