# What does ‘the elephant in the room’ mean?

To “the elephant in the room” means to an obvious problem no one wants to discuss. This is a 20th-century American idiom and is not in Brewer's 1898; the earliest clear print uses appear in the mid-1900s.

## What it means

- This is a 20th-century American idiom and is not in Brewer's 1898; the earliest clear print uses appear in the mid-1900s.

## Action steps

1. Common in meetings and family conversations to name a topic being avoided.
2. Example: Nobody mentioned the layoffs — the elephant in the room.

## Sources

- [Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898) — Internet Archive scan](https://archive.org/details/brewers-dictionary-of-phrase-and-fable)

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