Seeing pink elephants

"Seeing pink elephants" is a euphemism for hallucinations caused by delirium tremens or alcoholic hallucinosis, especially the former.

The term dates back to at least the early 20th century, emerging from earlier idioms about seeing snakes and other creatures.

In what may be the earliest recorded example of a (partially) pink elephant, Henry Wallace Phillips in the 1896 short story "The Man and the Serpent" – one of his "Fables for the Times" – refers to a drunken man seeing a "pink-and-green elephant" and a "feathered hippopotamus".

An early literary use of the term is by Jack London in 1913, who describes one kind of alcoholic, in the autobiographical John Barleycorn:There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers.

There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants.