white elephant

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The Word of the Day for August 20 is: 

white elephant   \WYTE-EL-uh-funt\   noun
    *1 : a property requiring much care and expense and yielding 
little profit 
     2 : an object no longer of value to its owner but of value 
to others 
     3 : something of little or no value

Example sentence:
     The town's white elephant is the closed theater, which 
earns no money but costs thousands of dollars to maintain.

Did you know?
     The real "white elephant" (the kind with a trunk) is a pale 
pachyderm that has long been an object of veneration in India, 
Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Myanmar. Too revered to be a beast of 
burden, the white elephant earned a reputation as a burdensome 
beast, one that required constant care and feeding but never 
brought a single cent (or paisa or satang or pya) to its owner. 
One story has it that the kings of Siam (the old name for 
Thailand) gave white elephants as gifts to those they wished to 
ruin, hoping that the cost of maintaining the voracious but 
sacred mammal would drive its new owner to the poorhouse.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.