Dictionary

elephantish en · ADJ

Etymology

From elephant + -ish. Piecewise doublet of elephantesque.

Meanings

1. Resembling an elephant.
   • People thought it was a sort of shrew, and because it had a long nose they said it looked a bit elephantish. But it's not a shrew and it doesn't really look like an elephant. 2019, Martin Brown, Even More Lesser Spotted Animals, Scholastic Incorporated, page 16:
   • There was a rustle and a bustle and Tiddles reappeared, looking rather sheepish. Can an elephant look sheepish? Can a sheep look elephantish? Do we care? No, we don’t. 2017, Jeremy Strong, Chariot Champions, Puffin, page 40:
   • It is an extinct animal, and on the whole was elephantish, but belonged to the genus Dinotherium, of the group Pachydermata or Proboscidea, to which the mammoth and elephant belong. 1877, Robert Brown, Science for All, volume 4, page 336, column 2:
   • They’d watched a herd of cat-sized lizards hunting massive elephantish creatures. 2015, Tim Lebbon, Predator: Incursion, Titan Books, page 90:
2. Resembling an elephant. ▸ Big, clumsy, or awkward.
   • Another blast rippled the air, and an elephantish man by the doors collapsed. I turned toward the sound. There was a wiry shooter in a hallway off the main floor aiming. I froze a second before frying him. He was a guard. 2020, Matt Ward, Wolfish: A YA Dystopian Sci-Fi Techno Thriller, Myrmani LLC, unnumbered page:
   • The majority of women in the current study did voice a dislike of pregnancy for reasons to do with the inherent unpleasantness of being ‘too fat’, ‘out of control’, ‘elephantish’, ‘heavy’, and being unable to fit into ordinary clothes. 1980, Ann Oakley, Women Confined: Towards a Sociology of Childbirth, Martin Robertson, page 211:
   • Even Clementine sighed, in an elephantish way. 2016, Micol Ostow, Louise Trapeze Can SO Save the Day, Random House, page 53:
3. Characteristic of an elephant.
   • The cleverest but one of all the animals in the circus was the elephant, and he hated the circus man too, and hated having to do silly tricks, which weren’t really a bit elephantish, but only stupid. 1960, Richard Hughes, The Spider's Palace, and Other Stories, Puffin Books, page 41:
   • We set down our loads the first of marry and sat shaded on wooden benches, with a little breeze wafting over us to watch forty elephants, young, old, female and male, involved in a dozen different elephantish behaviors 2002, April Pulley Sayre, Secrets of Sound: Studying the Calls and Songs of Whales, Elephants, and Birds, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, page 33:
   • Thus an elephant remains the same elephant although it changes size (within limits), provided it keeps other elephantish features. 1976, Keith Campbell, Metaphysics: An Introduction, Dickenson Publishing Company, page 80:
   • Members of the expedition each encounter a different part of the elephant — a leg, the trunk, an ear — and each, believing that he or she has come upon a tree, a snake, or something else un-elephantish, fails to recognize the elephant. 1990, Current Developments in Bankruptcy and Reorganization, volume 1, Practising Law Institute, page 881:
   • Since must there not have been some principle of goodness and sagaciousness first, existing in the elephants' perceptions, that the elephant was able to recognize too... some principle of tolerance, or above all pity, for his captor, who could not help himself, and a certain sense of interest in sportive adventure about whatever he was doing that he recognized as amusing and instructive to his elephantish faculties? 1992, Sherrill E Grace, Swinging the Maelstrom: New Perspectives on Malcolm Lowry, McGill-Queen's University Press, page 214:

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