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

Discovering nonfiction that reads like a story but keeps the scholarship front and center is the great white whale hunt for bookish adventurers. —Brianne Kane, Scientific American, 4 Dec. 2025

Well… no, there’s nobody who is like the white whale. —Mike Ryan, IndieWire, 18 Nov. 2025

The show, which pairs celebrity contestants with ballroom dancing pros, represents a white whale for network television – a linear program, on air for two decades, riding a ratings wave. —Anna Kaufman, USA Today, 9 Nov. 2025

But in recent years, New Jersey has been something of a white whale for Republicans. —W. James Antle Iii, The Washington Examiner, 4 Nov. 2025

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