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
  • 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
  • In town, the greengrocer finds a fuzzy, marmot-like creature with elephantine ears in a crate of oranges.
    Frances Leech, Longreads, 3 May 2018
  • Suddenly, the Four Guardsmen came into view: a tight quartet of elephantine sequoia trunks through which the road passes.
    Jon Mooallem, New York Times, 23 Mar. 2017
  • Johns’s entire body of work, to go by this elephantine show of more than 500 works, is akin to a trove of Nabokovian love letters — obscure and thwarted, but also punning, mordant, full of life.
    Washington Post, 29 Sep. 2021
  • Perry’s soloing was a melodic, piercing howl atop the latter’s elephantine riff.
    Marc Hirsh, BostonGlobe.com, 19 Apr. 2018
  • 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
  • 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
  • Put another way, how to engage in a covert propaganda campaign aimed at Trump, without upsetting his elephantine ego?
    New York Times, 9 June 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • The advertisements alone are like hieroglyphs: endless full pages selling elephantine audio equipment, brands of beer, cigarettes, fountain pens.
    Josephine Livingstone, New Republic, 29 Sep. 2017
  • No Simpsons writer or showrunner has publicly commented on their elephantine source material.
    David Reamer, Anchorage Daily News, 7 Dec. 2020
  • 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
  • But Mr Trump also feels unbound by agreements, oral or otherwise, made by previous governments, a blow to China and its elephantine capacity for remembering ancient half-promises.
    The Economist, 1 Aug. 2019

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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