white whale

noun

1

: beluga sense 2

2

or less commonly great white whale : something (such as a goal or object) that is obsessively pursued

… Apple's white whale these days seems to be developing a car.

—Steven Levy

It was the old man's white whale, the holy grail shining at the end of the dream, on and off the rails, as he chased scripts, directors, and movie stars of the proper magnitude.

—Rich Cohen

For drug makers, developing the first Alzheimer's therapy has long been seen as the great white whale: the toughest challenge and biggest opportunity.

—Robert Weisman

Illustration of white whale

• white whale 1

Examples of white whale in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Schizophrenia has always been psychiatry’s white whale, its cure an elusive Holy Grail. —Literary Hub, 28 Apr. 2026

Stearns was Cohen’s white whale, a boy wonder who turned the team in the league’s smallest market, Milwaukee, into a perennial contender on a shoestring budget. —Abbey Mastracco, New York Daily News, 27 Apr. 2026

For the current millennial and gen-z stars of musical theater, The Last Five Years was a white whale production. —Ct Jones, Rolling Stone, 20 Apr. 2026

These small, white whales are found in icy cold waters throughout the Arctic swimming in pods. —Kelsey Monstrola, USA Today, 17 Apr. 2026

Word History

Etymology

(sense 2) after the white sperm whale obsessively hunted by Captain Ahab in Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick (1851)

First Known Use

1635, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for white whale

• abigail
• cottontail
• countervail
• fingernail
• martingale
• mesoscale
• microscale
• monorail
• nanoscale
• ponytail
• swallowtail
• wensleydale