white elephant

1. 1.

   a valuable possession whose upkeep is excessively expensive

   Broaderpossession
2. 2.

   albinic Indian elephant; rare and sometimes venerated in east Asia

   BroaderIndian elephant

Questions about white elephant

What does white elephant mean?

white elephant means "a valuable possession whose upkeep is excessively expensive". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

Is white elephant a common word?

white elephant 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.