800-pound gorilla

English

Etymology

Attested since at least 1971, from a riddle: "Where does an 800-pound gorilla sleep?" / "Anywhere it wants."

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

Noun

800-pound gorilla (plural 800-pound gorillas)

1. (idiomatic) An entity that dominates its environment.
   • 2008 February 6, “Who’s the 800-Pound Gorilla?”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN:

     When it comes to the lucrative search market, Google, not Microsoft, is the 800-pound gorilla.

   • 2014 February 26, Eddie Gossage, quotee, “Bernie Ecclestone dismisses Nascar objection to US Grand Prix date clash”, in The Guardian‎^[2]:

     The thing he unfortunately doesn't recognise is there is an 800-pound gorilla when it comes to major American motor sports. The 800-pound gorilla is Nascar.

   • 2016 May 31, James Poniewozik, “Trump, 800-Pound Media Gorilla, Pounds His Chest at Reporters”, in The New York Times‎^[3], →ISSN:

     It was poetically fitting. For almost a year, Mr. Trump has been the 800-pound gorilla whose unpredictable rampages have obsessed the news media. Now he was completing the circle by commenting on the 400-pound gorilla who briefly stole the spotlight from him for one holiday weekend.

   • 2021, Jeroen Janssens, chapter 10, in Data Science at the Command Line, 2nd edition, O'Reilly, →ISBN:

     Apache Spark is a cluster-computing framework. It’s the 800-pound gorilla you turn to when it’s impossible to fit your data in memory.

2. (idiomatic) Something dangerous, menacing, or frightening that is obvious but not addressed.

   Synonym: elephant in the room

   • 2018 March 13, Jessica Glenza, “Sky-high prices of everything make US healthcare the world's most expensive”, in The Guardian‎^[4]:

     However, a co-author of the new study said those arguments ignore the “800-pound gorilla”: sky-high prices everywhere.

Usage notes

• The weight in the metaphor can be varied quantitatively.
• Occasionally other nouns are substituted, most commonly elephant from another idiom, but also more context-specific nouns, such as rutabaga in an article on gardening.
• Occasionally adjectives are inserted to modify gorilla to bring the metaphor closer to the context.

Derived terms

• 800-pound gorilla in the room

References

• “800-pound gorilla”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
• Instances of variation by weight from Spy