rat-ridden

English

Etymology

From rat +‎ -ridden.

Adjective

rat-ridden (comparative more rat-ridden, superlative most rat-ridden)

1. Full of or infested with rats.
   • 1870 April–September, Charles Dickens, chapter 1, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1870, →OCLC:

     He then lays certain silver money on the table, finds his hat, gropes his way down the broken stairs, gives a good morning to some rat-ridden doorkeeper, in bed in a black hutch beneath the stairs, and passes out.

   • 1905, Ford Madox Ford, The Benefactor, London: Brown, Langham & Co., Part IV, Chapter 3, p. 282,^[1]

     Years ago he had completed his purchase of the ramshackle and rat-ridden old barrack.

   • 1984 April 29, Henry Kamm, “Simple Compassion”, in New York Times:

     […] what Miss Borton found was a rat-ridden and overcrowded superslum that could be steered to as a goal, and accepted as even temporarily habitable, only by men, women and children who had come straight out of hell.

   • 1999, Philip French, “He killed a boy, and the binmen are on strike. Life really stinks...” (review of the film Ratcatcher), The Guardian, 14 November, 1999,^[2]

     The polluted canal and the foetid, rat-ridden garbage become forceful symbols of a society indifferent to the suffering in its lower depths and the inability of the demoralised to change their condition.