Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
elephant bird

elephant bird

9.9
A very large bird from Madagascar that could not fly and lived long ago
  • noun
  • /ˈɛlɪfənt bɜrd/
translation icon : ave elefante
  • The elephant bird was a giant flightless bird that stood up to 9 feet tall and lived in Madagascar.
  • the extinct elephant bird

Examples

  • Fossils of the elephant bird have been found showing they laid some of the largest eggs of any bird.

  • Eggs of the extinct elephant bird from Madagascar have five times the volume of the supposed Hypselosaurus eggs, so presumably no physiological reason prevented the development of even larger dinosaur eggs.

    Academic text (1991)

  • Scientists believe the elephant bird went extinct about 1,000 years ago due to human activity.

Synonyms

aepyornis
vselephant bird
  • Specialized
9.9

A very large extinct bird from Madagascar that could not fly and grew up to nine feet tall

is the common name used in everyday or nontechnical contexts

Surface Forms

elephant bird singular
elephant birds plural

Morphology

elephant + bird

The compound 'elephant bird' directly combines 'elephant' (a very large animal) with 'bird', so a B1 learner knowing the constituents will readily infer it denotes an unusually large bird. Specific facts (that it is extinct or flightless) are encyclopedic knowledge beyond the compound, but the core meaning is fully compositional and cross-linguistically transparent.

Etymology

Elephant bird may get its name from early travelers who found giant eggs and bones and imagined a bird as large and heavy as an elephant. So the name came to mean 'a very large extinct flightless bird' from Madagascar.