rat
/rat
/- Family Muridae: many genera, including Rattus (the Old World rats), and several hundred species.
- Cane rats should not be confused with domestic rodents such as rats and mice which can be disease-carrying vermin.
- Up until 1987 this kind of experiment had only done in rodents, rats and mice, and in lower organisms.
- He, who's a braggart and a drunk and a rat and a scoundrel, at his death bed, says, I find Christ.
- How can you make a philandering love cheat, who works his way through a family of sisters, anything but a rogue and a rat?
- ‘For your information this little rat insulted me’ Debbie huffed sticking her chin up snobbishly.
Synonyms
- It's different when Right Wingers want to crush free speech and create a police state environment of informers and rats in a house of worship.
- I go by beeper now because there's too many rats [informants] on the street.
- Mr. Ken told me that the rat was an informant for the enemy.
Synonyms
- There's nowhere else I'd rather be right now - on a trip in South Africa with a good crew and having fun, skating everyday, and doing a real skate rat tour.
- Mali, while seeming sophisticated, wanders in and out of ghetto rat behavior, especially when it comes to her man, Tad Honeywell.
- At the first, it was decided to axe three popular characters - love rat doctor Matt Ramsden, his teacher wife Charlie, and shopworker Bobbi Lewis.
- Divisions were actually for sale at Behnke, a nursery local to me and I didn't know it - rats!
Synonyms
- In another era, perhaps he and his mates would simply have gone out poaching or ratting, grumbling about bloody women along the way.
- The Shar Pei still exhibits these herding and ratting instincts.
- The Giant Schnauzer's original job was ratting.
- The Stability Pact was to have kept the currency health, but it became inconvenient for France, which ratted, followed by Germany, France, Italy, Holland, and Greece.
- Shortly afterwards, getting into his car, he was called by name and, when he turned, was shot through the forehead by a fellow extremist who suspected he had ratted.
- The other men don't shoot the soldier who ratted, however.
- She's got long black hair, ratted and dry, and it hangs down over her shoulders like a fern that hasn't been watered in weeks.
- There was Stacey in her big girl bra, ratted out hair and adult acne.
Phrases
like a rat up a drainpipe
Phrasal verbs
rat on
Origin
Old English ræt, probably of Romance origin; reinforced in Middle English by Old French rat. The verb dates from the early 19th century.
The rat has been part of our language since Anglo-Saxon times, but its ultimate origin is not known. It probably goes back to the time when the creature first came to Europe from Asia. The term rat race has been used since the mid 20th century. The image behind this is of rats struggling with each other to move forward in a confined space, rather than of the ordered world of a race track. Sailing ships would traditionally have been infested with rats, which would try to escape en masse from a vessel that was in trouble. This gave rise to rats deserting a sinking ship. A person has been a rat since the 1760s, and 50 or so years later to rat started to mean ‘to desert a cause, become a traitor’ and then ‘to inform on’. Someone who suspects a trick is said to smell a rat—a phrase which in the 18th century is found as part of an elaborate mixed metaphor attributed to an Irish politician, Boyle Roche: ‘Mr Speaker, I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air and darkening the sky; but I'll nip him in the bud.’