elephantess

From elephant +‎ -ess.

elephantess (plural elephantesses)

1. A female elephant.
   • 1854, Grace Greenwood [pseudonym; Sara Jane Lippincott], chapter III, in Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe, Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, page 54:

     I wish I could dash off a sketch of her stupendous majesty the great elephantess, with the clumsy little prince royal, the calf elephant, as they appeared when enjoying themselves in their bath; and of his royal highness the great camelopard, as he stood stretching his interminable neck over the railing, impertinently watching them in their recreation.

   • 1873, W[illiam] H[enry] Davenport Adams, “The Elephant: His History and Habits”, in The Forest, the Jungle, and the Prairie; or, Scenes with the Trapper and the Hunter in Many Lands, London: T Nelson and Sons, , page 360:

     It was now time to bring new actors upon the stage, that the proverbial influence of the female sex might be tested upon these wild and untamed leviathans. Among the elephantesses—pardon the word—employed on this occasion was one named Siribeddi, which had earned a reputation for her skill as a decoy, and now did her best to justify that reputation.

   • 1902, Dorothy Dix [pen name; Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer], “The Elephantess who Tried to be Cute”, in Fables of the Elite, New York, N.Y.: R. F. Fenno & Company, , pages 155–156:

     Now, it chanced that there dwelt in the same Forest a young Elephantess, who perceived that the Kitten was copping the cash, and had all the other Female Animals so Faded they looked like a Shirt Waist fresh from a Chinese Laundry. […] Being a thoughtful Creature, however, the Elephantess did not knock her rival’s game, but began to study the Kitten’s system, to see if there was not a soft spot where she could butt into the money.

   • 1904, Manmatha Nath Dutt, transl., A Prose English Translation of Agni Puranam, volume II, Calcutta: H. C. Das, Elysium Press, , pages 1057 and 1195–1196:

     Elephantesses should be employed to decoy stupid and amorous wild elephants into the trap (1—4). […] Similarly, a fifty thousand libations, consisting of sesamum seeds and clarified cow-butter, would stamp out an epidemic affecting the bipeds only, whereas the ceremony should be repeated at the breaking out of a pestilential disease, or on the occasion of elephantess developing a pair of tusks, and portending evil to the state. The evil consequences of an elephantess, exuding serum from her temple, would be warded off by a Homa of ten thousand libations, whereas an epidemic of miscarriages of the womb, or of deaths of new-born infants in a community, would prove amenable to a similar Homa, consisting of as many libations (10—13).

   • 1942, D. G. Koparkar, English Guide to C. V. Joshi’s Manual of Pāli, Oriental Book Agency, pages 4 and 6:

     The elephantess of Udena runs in the sand like lightning. […] Elephants wander in the forest with elephantesses.

   • 1978, The Yoga-Vásishtha-Mahárámáyana of Válmiki, Bharatiya Publishing House, page 991:

     “Behold here the damsels of Vidyádharas, are waiting for you with fans and wreaths of flowers in their hands; and they have been hailing and inviting you to them, as the young elephantess, entices the big elephant towards her.”

   • 1983, Upadhyay Shri Pushkar Muni, edited by Shree Devendra Muni, Punyano Prabhav, Ahmedabad: Shree Laxmi Pustak Bhandar, pages 145–146:

     Let us decorate an elephantess, give a garland in its trunk and, take her in the garden. […] Sajjan was made to seat on the same elephantess.

   • 1986, Janice L. Doane, Silence and Narrative: The Early Novels of Gertrude Stein, Greenwood Press, →ISBN, page xvii:

     Rather, from Bridgman’s account of her early career Stein emerges as an elephantess in the china shop of literature: “Expending prodigious amounts of energy, Stein thrashed erratically toward innovation.”

• cow elephant