rat-ridden

comparative more rat-ridden · superlative most rat-ridden

1. Full of or infested with rats.

   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.

   3 more examples

   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.

   1870 April–September, Charles Dickens, chapter 1, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1870, →OCLC

   […] 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.

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

   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.