heffalump
/ˈhɛfəˌlʌmp/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.54 in modern English
22
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
3
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Alternative letter-case form of heffalump.
Example Sentences
- "We went to the zoo and saw some heffalumps."
- "Mrs. Jumbo stood at the door with the baby heffalump in her arms. She waved a large blue handkerchief and heffalump waved his little white paws. "Goodbye, Daddy Jumbo, Goodbye" they cried. "Goodbye Mummy Jumbo, goodbye baby heffalump.""
- "From time to time to time, bones clearly recognized as those of elephants have been found in the North Temperate Zone. In Western Europe the explanation always was, "These are the remains of the army-elephants of Hannibal the Carthaginian." […"
- "Yeees, we're going to the zoo to see animals. There are lions and tiggers and snakes and heffalumps."
- "In the "Heffalumps and Woozles" ditty from Winnie the Pooh, elephants—those would be the heffalumps—wear tuxedos and use their trunks as accordions and suddenly turn blue. Fantastical, to be sure, but it's downright unimaginative compared to what European natural historians used to believe about the elephant: That it has no knees and it can't have sex until it eats the ridiculously toxic mandrake root, and even when it successfully mates, dragons eat its baby."
- "With the study in this chapter, we continue the hunt for the Heffalump to answer the 'who is the entrepreneur' question [...]. The Heffalump is a character from Winnie-the-Pooh that has been hunted by many individuals using various ingenious trapping devices, but no one has succeeded in capturing it so far. All who claim to have caught sight of it report that it is enormous, but they disagree on its particularities [...]."
Etymology
Probably a childish mispronunciation of elephant, perhaps influenced by half a lump (as in "I'll have half a lump of sugar in my tea"), coined by the English author Alan Alexander Milne (1882–1956) as the name of an imaginary animal in his book Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). The animal was not described in the book, but the illustrator Ernest Howard Shepard (1879–1976) depicted it as an elephant. Sense 2 (“something which is elusive”) refers to the fact that in Milne’s book the characters Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet set a trap for, but are unable to capture, a heffalump.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈhɛfəˌlʌmp/
- British English: /ˈhɛfəlʌmp/