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white elephant

Translate white elephant | into French | into German | into Italian | into Spanish
Definition of white elephant

noun

  • a possession that is useless or troublesome, especially one that is expensive to maintain or difficult to dispose of: a huge white elephant of a house that needed ten thousand spent on it

Origin:

from the story that the kings of Siam gave such animals as a gift to courtiers they disliked, in order to ruin the recipient by the great expense incurred in maintaining the animal

white elephant in other Oxford dictionaries

Definition of white elephant in the US English dictionary

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