See see the elephant in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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},
{
"form": "seeing the elephant",
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},
{
"form": "saw the elephant",
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"name": "en-verb"
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"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
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"glosses": [
"To witness something unexpected and awe-inspiring."
],
"id": "en-see_the_elephant-en-verb-GzFwCuwd",
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"(US, obsolete, slang) To witness something unexpected and awe-inspiring."
],
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"examples": [
{
"ref": "1846, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, page 338:",
"text": "\"[W]hy he's a natural born carakter. He is the best hand at a yarn in all west country, and will whip more cats, tell more lies, and eat more pork, than any fellow in Texas. […] [H]e's rare, jist the chap, and no mistake. He's seen the elephant, I imagine, a little more nor twice, I expect.\"",
"type": "quote"
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],
"glosses": [
"To be up to the latest moves; to be knowing and worldly."
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"(US, obsolete, slang) To be up to the latest moves; to be knowing and worldly."
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"glosses": [
"To witness or participate in a battle."
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"(US, American Civil War, slang) To witness or participate in a battle."
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"Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see see, the, elephant."
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"To witness something unexpected and awe-inspiring."
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"(US, obsolete, slang) To witness something unexpected and awe-inspiring."
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"text": "\"[W]hy he's a natural born carakter. He is the best hand at a yarn in all west country, and will whip more cats, tell more lies, and eat more pork, than any fellow in Texas. […] [H]e's rare, jist the chap, and no mistake. He's seen the elephant, I imagine, a little more nor twice, I expect.\"",
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"(US, obsolete, slang) To be up to the latest moves; to be knowing and worldly."
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"US",
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"To witness or participate in a battle."
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"(US, American Civil War, slang) To witness or participate in a battle."
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Download raw JSONL data for see the elephant meaning in English (2.7kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-03-13 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-03-02 using wiktextract (f074e77 and 633533e). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.