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English
Etymology
From rat + -ridden.
Adjective
rat-ridden (comparative more rat-ridden, superlative most rat-ridden)
- 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,
- 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,
- 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.