# heffalump

> English word · Noun · IPA /ˈhɛfəlʌmp/

## Definitions
1. (A child's name for) an elephant.
2. Something that is elusive.
3. A clumsy or overweight person.

## 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.

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/heffalump