1 a small animal with a long tail, that looks like a large mouse, usually considered a PEST (= an animal which is disliked because it destroys food or spreads disease):
rat poison * The police are all over town. He's caught, like a rat in a trap.
2 (informal, disapproving) an unpleasant person, especially one who is not loyal or tricks sb:
You mean he just walked out on her after fifteen years? What a rat!
IDIOMS see SINKv., SMELLv.
verb (-tt-)
PHRASALVERBS
rat on sb (informal) to tell sb in authority about sth wrong that sb else has done:
Where I come from, you don't rat on your friends.
rat on sth (BrE, informal) to not do sth that you have agreed or promised to do:
The government is accused of ratting on its promises to the unemployed.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for rat is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is rat a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, rat is tagged as noun.
Does rat appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — rat appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
