How to Use elephant in the room in a Sentence

elephant in the room

noun phrase
  • The elephant in the room is how to pay for the project.
    — Ron Wood, Arkansas Online, 20 Oct. 2023
  • Which brings us to the elephant in the room, um, or the big garbage patch in the room, in the ocean.
    — Quartz Staff, Quartz, 16 May 2023
  • There's a lot of dancing around the elephants in the room.
    — Nick Romano, EW.com, 14 Oct. 2024
  • The elephant in the room is that the Hawks didn’t land a whale themselves.
    — Phil Thompson, Chicago Tribune, 28 Jan. 2025
  • The elephant in the room, or rather on the show lawn, is the issue of timing.
    — Viju Mathew, Robb Report, 28 Feb. 2024
  • Time to go on the hunt, even with an IPO-sized elephant in the room to contend with.
    — Allie Garfinkle, Fortune, 30 Jan. 2024
  • The prequels, on the other hand, felt more like an elephant in the room.
    — Christopher Cruz, Rolling Stone, 11 July 2024
  • First and foremost, the elephant in the room should be discussed.
    — Tony Blengino, Forbes, 16 Dec. 2024
  • Address the elephant in the room as the sun and Chiron clash.
    — USA TODAY, 6 Jan. 2024
  • Shane Gillis acknowledged the elephant in the room right away – sort of.
    — Rebecca Sun, The Hollywood Reporter, 25 Feb. 2024
  • At one point, Kosher addresses the elephant in the room.
    — Jayson Buford, Rolling Stone, 2 June 2023
  • From there, there was the subtext from teammates about an elephant in the room.
    — Ira Winderman, Sun Sentinel, 22 Jan. 2025
  • Ellen DeGeneres will soon address the elephant in the room.
    — Wesley Stenzel, EW.com, 13 May 2024
  • That is the elephant in the room that can't be ignored or unaddressed.
    — Simon Thompson, Forbes, 10 Sep. 2024
  • The elephant in the room, though, is how Richardson will mature as a leader.
    — James Boyd, The Athletic, 10 Jan. 2025
  • Kavanaugh also addressed the elephant in the room: Trump’s desire to help save the app.
    — Kaelan Deese, Washington Examiner - Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government, 10 Jan. 2025
  • Here’s the elephant in the room—Milwaukee’s defense might be their Achilles’ heel.
    — Brian Sampson, Forbes, 22 Oct. 2024
  • The Dreyfus case itself remained the major elephant in the room.
    — Maurice Samuels / Made By History, TIME, 21 May 2024
  • That’s the elephant in the room that city leaders have refused to acknowledge.
    — Tim Gardner, The Mercury News, 22 June 2024
  • Time and again, society pressures people not to see, hear or speak about the elephant in the room.
    — Marianne Cooper, Scientific American, 18 June 2024
  • But there’s another elephant in the room, and that’s staff shortages.
    — Beth Ann Mayer, Parents, 2 Feb. 2024
  • But despite the absence of Xi, China would have been the elephant in the room throughout Putin and Kim’s meeting.
    — Nectar Gan, CNN, 23 June 2024
  • But the elephant in the room is reining in hospitals, which make up the largest portion of U.S. health care spending.
    — Rachel Cohrs, STAT, 26 Oct. 2023
  • To her, the elephant in the room used to be the occupation, which, in her words, turned West Bank and Gaza into the biggest open prisons in the world.
    — Tomris Laffly, Variety, 26 Jan. 2025
  • Yet Ukraine’s shortage of weaponry in the face of nearly five months of Russia’s offensive hung over the whole day like the elephant in the room.
    — Constant Méheut, New York Times, 25 Feb. 2024
  • Yet there’s an elephant in the room – more than one actually.
    — Nate Davis, USA TODAY, 11 Jan. 2024
  • Yet that line of reasoning ignored a very large elephant in the room—the Colorado River.
    — Erik Vance, Scientific American, 1 Aug. 2017
  • Melius Research moved to the sidelines on Advanced Micro Devices , but there isn’t any elephant in the room with this call.
    — Alex Harring, CNBC, 28 Jan. 2025
  • With fatherhood as the subject of the new series, Frasier’s distance from Freddy feels like the elephant in the room.
    — Lili Loofbourow, Washington Post, 10 Oct. 2023
  • One of the reasons Israel and Hamas were able to come to terms last week was because the elephant in the room—ending the war—was kicked to future negotiations.
    — John Yoo and John Shu, Newsweek, 23 Jan. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'elephant in the room.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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