elephant's-foot

Questions about elephant's-foot

What does elephant's-foot mean?

elephant's-foot means "South African vine having a massive rootstock covered with deeply fissured bark". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in elephant's-foot?

elephant's-foot has 4 syllables and divides as e-le-phant's--foot under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for elephant's-foot?

Close synonyms include tortoise plant, Hottentot bread vine, Hottentot's bread vine, Dioscorea elephantipes. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is elephant's-foot a common word?

elephant's-foot is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.