Elephant

How to spell elephant

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce elephant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does elephant mean?

1. nounA very large mammal with a long trunk, large ears, and ivory tusks, native to Africa and Asia.

Elephant in a sentence

• An elephant at the zoo trumpeted loudly.

• The elephant is the largest land animal.

Where does elephant come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek elephas, which curiously meant both 'ivory' and the animal itself, since the tusks were the prized commodity that brought the creature to Mediterranean attention. The Greek term passed into Latin as elephantus, and from there the Old French olifant and the Latin form fed into Middle English, where early spellings such as olifaunt circulated before the more classical 'elephant' settled in around the 1300s. The deeper roots of elephas are uncertain, possibly drawing on a Hamitic or other African or Asian source for the ivory trade, so the very origin is debated. The spelling trap lies in the unstressed middle and final vowels: the 'eleph' uses 'ph' for an 'f' sound, a clear sign of its Greek pedigree, and the ending is '-ant', not the '-ent' that many adults instinctively reach for.

How the word is built

• eleph- (from Greek elephas: ivory, elephant)
• -ant (noun ending)