Elephants

Elephants occupy a small but revealing place in the history of English reference: they are at once animals to be described, names attached to inns, and words whose meanings and histories writers could not always check. The account sets William Shakespeare’s passing allusion to an Elephant inn beside Samuel Johnson’s expansive description and the Oxford English Dictionary’s later record of the word. Across these examples, the elephant becomes a measure of how dictionaries turn uncertain knowledge into an organized public record.

Shakespeare and the problem of reference

In Twelfth Night, Sebastian recommends lodging at the Elephant, an inn in Illyria. The name prompts questions rather than answers: inns in several European cities bore it, including at least two in London, but the reason for the custom is not established. Nor does the passage claim that Shakespeare knew what prompted the name. It asks whether he knew much about elephants at all, and whether he could be sure that the inn’s name referred to that animal rather than a camel, rhinoceros, or gnu. The uncertainty matters because the allusion depends on a word whose reference a reader or playwright might want to verify.

The difficulty extended beyond this single animal. In the same play Shakespeare uses words and expressions such as consanguineous, changeable taffeta, and woodcock near the gin. The account treats this vocabulary as evidence of range, while asking how a writer could check unfamiliar terms for grammatical or factual accuracy. In Shakespeare’s time, there was no dictionary to consult. Books on many other subjects were available, and Shakespeare is thought to have drawn classical allusions from Thomas Cooper’s specialized thesaurus and from Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique. Those resources did not amount to the broader literary, linguistic, and lexical reference works that the later dictionary age would make familiar.

Johnson’s natural-history portrait

Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language offers a very different encounter with the elephant. Its volumes are described as heavy, richly bound books made for a lectern rather than easy handling: brown leather, thick creamy paper, and deeply impressed print. Their physical scale and Johnson’s fluent definitions make looking up an animal feel like entering a substantial work of scholarship, not simply checking a label.

Johnson defines the elephant through a cluster of qualities and features. It is the largest quadruped; it is not carnivorous, but feeds on hay, herbs, and pulse; and it is said to live for a long time. The entry presents it as naturally gentle yet formidable when enraged. It describes the trunk as a long, hollow cartilage hanging between the teeth and serving in place of hands, and identifies the tusks as the source of ivory familiar in Europe. In this account, an elephant is made intelligible through size, diet, temperament, anatomy, and the uses of its body. The definition also draws on reports of the animal’s sagacity, faithfulness, prudence, and understanding, so its portrait blends physical description with judgments about its character.

The word’s recorded history

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the elephant a different kind of history. Its entry begins with a long record of forms, including earlier spellings such as olifaunt and oliphant alongside the later form elephant. The sequence makes visible that the familiar modern spelling was not the word’s only English shape. The dictionary traces the forms through Middle English and Old French to a corrupted Latin form associated with Greek, while noting that the reshaping toward Latin occurred earlier in English than in French.

That account is more assured about the chain of forms than about the word’s ultimate origin. The Greek word is found in Homer and Hesiod in the sense of ivory, which the entry gives as a reason to doubt a proposed Indian origin. Other explanations have connected the sound to the Hebrew word for ox and suggested a Phoenician or Punic source, or an African origin. The origins of the older forms beginning with ol- are likewise unknown. Rather than resolve these uncertainties, the entry records the suggestions and marks the limits of what can be known. Its historical method preserves competing explanations without converting conjecture into certainty.

The dictionary’s concise zoological definition then identifies the elephant as a huge quadruped with long, curving ivory tusks and a prehensile trunk or proboscis. It distinguishes African and Indian species, describing the African as the largest living land animal and the Indian as an animal often used for carrying burdens and in war. Compared with Johnson’s extended portrait, this formulation is shorter and more classificatory: it foregrounds anatomical traits, species, distribution, and human uses. Together, the entries show that a dictionary definition can reflect not only what an animal is, but also the purposes and knowledge systems through which it is described.

From animal to dictionary example

The elephant links a theatrical problem of reference to a broader history of lexicography. Shakespeare’s inn-name raises the ordinary question of how a word points to a thing; Johnson answers with a lavish account of the creature; the Oxford English Dictionary records the word’s changing forms and leaves its deepest origin open. These are not interchangeable treatments. One begins in a play and exposes the limits of available reference, another gathers observations and reported qualities into a portrait, and the third organizes linguistic evidence across time.

That progression also gives the animal two kinds of presence in the account. The elephant is a living creature described by its body and habits, but it is also an example through which dictionaries reveal their own ambitions and limits. Johnson’s entry delights through its details, while the later historical record distinguishes attested forms from uncertain explanation. The unanswered question of why inns were named the Elephant remains beside both: even a word carefully defined and traced cannot, by itself, explain every human use of it.