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rat race
noun
- any exhausting, unremitting, and usually competitive activity or routine, especially a pressured urban working life spent trying to get ahead with little time left for leisure, contemplation, etc.
rat race
noun
- a continual routine of hectic competitive activity
working in the City is a real rat race
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Word History and Origins
Origin of rat race1
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Idioms and Phrases
Fierce competition to maintain or improve one's position in the workplace or social life. For example, You may not realize what a rat race it is to get research grants . This term presumably alludes to the rat's desperate struggle for survival. [ Colloquial ; first half of 1900s]Discover More
Example Sentences
The Daily Pic: James Nares slows Manhattan's rat race to a snail's pace.
To stay, and attempt to make the cartel rat-race over, sweetly and rationally so that no one would be hurt?
They suffered the ever-present agitation of envy, the constant comparison to one's superiors, the plagued rat race.
But under torment of insomnia the many selves of the mind may abandon the congress of reason and start a rat-race.
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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.
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