How to use elephantine in a sentence

11 example sentences · adjective, noun

Elephantine means of, relating to, resembling, or characteristic of elephants. Example: “Dark mists swirled round them and elephantine shapes lurked indistinctly in the shadows.”

Examples of elephantine by meaning

adjectiveOf, relating to, resembling, or characteristic of elephants.

Dark mists swirled round them and elephantine shapes lurked indistinctly in the shadows.1979, Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, →ISBN, page 132
Kuba hadn’t thought of it himself, it was the brainchild of the elephantine genius Parvus, who had been writing to him from Constantinople.1989, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by H. T. Willetts, August 1914, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, page 179
Overhead and all around came the elephantine sounds of hundreds of students on the move.2003, J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix, →ISBN, page 248

adjectiveVery large.

Ugly, clumsy and far from silent, with elephantine point mechanisms at the car sheds, it nevertheless works and has been brought up to date electrically for further public service.1964 July, “The mythology of monorails”, in Modern Railways, page 1
And then shortening its life though the wear and tear of tamping to counter the effect of elephantine passenger vehicles.2020 May 6, Prof. Andrew McNaughton, “Time to challenge some sacred philosophies of recent years”, in Rail, pages 32, 34

More sentences with elephantine

Rupioid, elephantine, and ostraceous psoriasis are special forms of plaque psoriasis characterized by gross hyperkeratosis.2016, Jayakar Thomas, Textbook of Psoriasis, →ISBN, page 46. From the entry ostraceous
And if you're a human being, you are more elephantine than muscine.2009, David P. Barash, Judith Eve Lipton, How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories, page 185. From the entry muscine
The pitch some fathoms below is bathed in the blue light provided by the elephantine fluorescent tubing that overgirds our fine stadium .2020, Mark Blacklock, Hinton. From the entry overgird
A Norman capital can be heavy because the Norman column is thick, and the whole thing expresses an elephantine massiveness and repose.1920, G. K. Chesterton, chapter 11, in The New Jerusalem. From the entry massiveness
Robert Bakker first challenged the conventional view that ceratopsians' front limbs sprawled, with his own idea that their front limbs had an elephantine or rhinocerine posture.2002, Allen A. Debus, Diane E. Debus, Dinosaur Memories, Authors Choice Press, page 256. From the entry rhinocerine
Three elephantine examples of that trend have been in the news of late, and they call into question their underlying maximalist presumption that more is more.1990 May 27, John Rockwell, “Complete Everything, or Is More Enough?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN. From the entry maximalist

Meaning of elephantine

adjective Of, relating to, resembling, or characteristic of elephants.
adjective Very large.
noun Any member of the subfamily Elephantinae of elephants and their extinct close relatives.

Full definition of elephantine

Questions about elephantine in a sentence

How do you use elephantine in a sentence?: Elephantine is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “Dark mists swirled round them and elephantine shapes lurked indistinctly in the shadows.”
What is a short sentence with elephantine?: “And if you're a human being, you are more elephantine than muscine.”
What does elephantine mean?: Elephantine means of, relating to, resembling, or characteristic of elephants.

Adapted from Wiktionary: elephantine (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this page: “How to use elephantine in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/elephantine. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.