Also called wood rat. Also called trade rat,. a large, bushy-tailed rodent, Neotoma cinerea, of North America, noted for carrying off small articles to store in its nest.
Informal. a person who saves things that are not needed or used but that may have personal or other value.
Informal. an old prospector or guide.
First recorded in 1840–50
First recorded in 1870–75
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The Rat Pack connoisseur confesses to being a bit of a pack rat.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 12, 2021
Poorly, with the eye and tatty grace of a pack rat.
From New York Times ● Apr. 15, 2021
He had known that his mother, Sandy Quimby, a half-hour away in Eagle River, was a pack rat.
From Washington Post ● Nov. 22, 2020
He is a pack rat, and kept the original packaging.
From The New Yorker ● Jul. 22, 2019
He was a regular pack rat, though smaller.
From "Secrets at Sea" by Richard Peck
Instead, most of it is a mélange of the pack-rat artist’s correspondence, clippings, snapshots, short reminiscences from friends and former teachers, gallery announcements, brief essays, exhibition photographs and more.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 16, 2018
Brian Prather’s scenic design illustrates Dr. Westheimer’s admitted pack-rat tendencies.
From New York Times ● Jun. 15, 2013
Ms. Haws said the archive benefited from the pack-rat mentality of its founders: the players themselves, who governed the Philharmonic for its first 75 years and kept meticulous records.
From New York Times ● Feb. 3, 2011
The glistening balls mistaken for a snack that day in Nevada were later identified as pack-rat middens -- globs of crystallized pack-rat urine containing sticks, plant fragments, bones and animal dung.
From Time Magazine Archive
An over-sanguine pack-rat tried to scramble up the tar-paper covering on the outside and squeaked as he fell back with a thud, but the face of neither man relaxed.
From The Man from the Bitter Roots by Lockhart, Caroline
Kurzweil has preserved fifty boxes of his father’s effects, everything from his letters and photographs to his electric bills, all pack-ratted into a storage facility in Newton, Massachusetts.
From The New Yorker ● Mar. 27, 2017
Mr. Showalter doesn’t hang out in the house much, but the pack-ratting motif allows him and his co-writer, Laura Terruso, to pad the story with some family storming and stressing.
From New York Times ● Mar. 10, 2016
But viewers have never seen pack-ratting through the lens of "Thy Father's Chair," a new documentary that makes hoarding as urgent as global warming and as impossible to turn away from as Al Gore's beard.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 7, 2016
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
