elephantine

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

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

   The scene around them was currently plunged into gloom. Dark mists swirled round them and elephantine shapes lurked indistinctly in the shadows.

2. 2
   adj

   Very large.

   He comes into Brewer from the south, seeing it in the smoky shadow before dawn as a gradual multiplication of houses among the trees beside the road and then as a treeless waste of industry, shoe factories and bottling plants and company parking lots and knitting mills converted to electronics parts and elephantine gas tanks lifting above trash-filled swampland yet lower than the blue edge of the mountain from whose crest Brewer was a warm carpet woven around a single shade of brick.

3. 3
   adj

   of great mass

4. 4
   noun

   Any member of the subfamily Elephantinae of elephants and their extinct close relatives.

5. 5
   name

   An island in the river Nile, and the ancient city that occupied it.

6. 6
   adj

   Of, from, or pertaining to Elephantine or the Elephantine people.

Etymology

From Latin elephantīn(us). By surface analysis, elephant + -ine.