elephantine

adj

1. 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. 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.”

   “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.”

   “At one level, that may mean tailoring services to demand and introducing vehicles that are genuinely lighter in weight. At another, calculating the energy and emissions of track renewal - whether steel rail, concrete sleepers or mining ballast, crushing, shipping using dirty fuel, and re-handling it before finally placing and maintaining with diesel equipment. And then shortening its life though the wear and tear of tamping to counter the effect of elephantine passenger vehicles.”

3. (not-comparable)Of, from, or pertaining to Elephantine or the Elephantine people.

noun

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

name

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