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Elephantine means slow, heavy, and awkward, the way an elephant moves — big steps, not light on its feet, a little because of the size. You might hear an elephantine walk, an elephantine attempt to dance, or an elephantine office that cannot change direction. It is often teasing, and sometimes ; you would not usually say it to someone’s face about their body. It is a rather literary or newspaper word; most people would just say or like an elephant. Though actually, writers also stretch it to mean simply “huge”, without the clumsiness — an elephantine task, an elephantine sandwich — and you will see both uses. Learn the “heavy and awkward” picture first: the animal’s body, not only its size. It does not mean “about elephants” in a textbook way.
笨重的、像大象一樣笨拙的
組成From Latin elephantīnus. On the surface: elephant + -ine (“like / of that kind”).
同家族的字
- elephantthe animal; -ine here means “like” that animal
原始詞典資料5 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Elephantinename
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An island in the river Nile, and the ancient city that occupied it.
Elephantineadj
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Of, from, or pertaining to Elephantine or the Elephantine people.
elephantineadj/ɛl.əˈfæn.tin/
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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.
- This last summer Hanecki had captured Lenin’s imagination with his plans to found a trading company of his own in Europe, or take a partnership in some existing firm and make guaranteed monthly remittances to the Party out of his profits. This was not a Russian pipe dream: every move had been worked out with impressive precision. Kuba hadn’t thought of it himself, it was the brainchild of the elephantine genius Parvus, who had been writing to him from Constantinople. Parvus, once as poor as any other Social Democrat, had gone to Turkey to organize strikes, and now wrote frankly that he had all the money he needed (if rumor was right, he was fabulously wealthy) and that the time had come for the Party too to get rich.
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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.
elephantinenoun/ɛl.əˈfæn.tin/
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biologynatural-scienceszoologyAny member of the subfamily Elephantinae of elephants and their extinct close relatives.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。