“Elephant’s trunk” is Cockney rhyming slang for drunk, with “trunk” standing in for the rhyming word. It is usually shortened to just “elephants”, used as an adjective for someone who is drunk. Green’s Dictionary of Slang also records a narrower use, where the phrase describes delirium tremens, the shaking and hallucinating that can follow heavy drinking, rather than ordinary drunkenness. That sense overlaps with the separate idiom of seeing “pink elephants”, though the two arose independently.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘elephants trunk’?
Like most rhyming slang, “elephant’s trunk” works by taking a word, here “drunk”, and replacing it with a phrase that rhymes with it. Once the rhyme is established, the second half is often dropped, which is why the shortened “elephants” became the more common form. Collins describes “elephants” as a twentieth century abbreviation of “elephant’s trunk” used as rhyming slang for drunk.
The earliest documented example currently traced is from a north east England newspaper rather than London itself. The Hartlepool Mail of 26 February 1898 glossed the word plainly: “Elephants, elevated, drunk.” This shows the shortened form already circulating as an understood piece of slang by the end of the nineteenth century, with “elevated” used as a genteel period synonym for drunk.
Despite that early citation coming from the north east, the phrase is generally treated as London in origin, in keeping with the broader tradition of Cockney rhyming slang built around East End speech. It became known as a piece of London rhyming slang roughly a century old, still heard occasionally but mostly used in a joking way rather than as everyday speech. That fits the pattern of many rhyming slang terms, which start as genuine coded speech and later survive chiefly as old fashioned banter about being drunk.