How to Use brown rat in a Sentence

brown rat

noun
  • Pack rats, as well as their cousins the black and brown rats, don’t just collect sticks and seeds.
    Sadie Witkowski, Smithsonian, 15 Nov. 2019
  • Unlike the brown rat, the black rat is known to have carried plague through fleas on its body.
    Madeleine Schwartz, The New York Review of Books, 27 July 2023
  • Some people speculate that the brown rat saved us from the plague.
    Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, 26 Apr. 2021
  • The city’s rat is a Rattus norvegicus, also known as the brown rat, wharf rat, or sewer rat.
    Madeleine Schwartz, The New York Review of Books, 27 July 2023
  • Seoul spreads among and from the common brown rat—sometimes called a sewer rat, wharf rat, or Norway rat.
    Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 4 Mar. 2022
  • Its programs use African Giant Pouched Rats, which have a longer lifespan in captivity of around eight years compared to the four years of the common brown rat.
    Rebecca Cairns, CNN, 24 Oct. 2022
  • Hiding inside ships, the brown rat made its way to Europe in the 1500s and then to the Western hemisphere, Africa and Australia as colonizers arrived.
    María Luisa Paúl, Washington Post, 2 Dec. 2022
  • In our study, the commonest wild animal detected in New York City waters was the brown rat, a common urban denizen.
    Mark Stoeckle, Smithsonian, 13 Apr. 2017
  • The extinct animal is also closely related to a living rat species, sharing around 95 percent of its genome with the Norway brown rat, according to the study.
    NBC News, 9 Mar. 2022
  • For comparison purposes, the modern brown rat is less than one foot in length and weighs approximately 8 ounces.
    Fox News, 15 Feb. 2020
  • Perhaps in part because of this, brown rats have been found to consistently prefer rewards that benefit others, as opposed to just themselves.
    Oliver Whang, New York Times, 27 Feb. 2023
  • From his bedroom window, Mr. Matallana-Puerto saw that the brown rat accounted for 88 percent of all animal visits to feijoa flowers.
    New York Times, 22 June 2022
  • The past decade has seen a boom in descriptions of unexpected pollinators, including lizards, opossums, brown rats and cockroaches.
    Asher Elbein, Scientific American, 6 May 2023
  • Humans brought brown rats to North America, destroyed the habitat of potential predators and created environments where rats could thrive.
    Oliver Whang, New York Times, 27 Feb. 2023
  • Rattus norvegicus - the brown rat - is a destructive force in much of the world, wreaking ecological havoc, contaminating crops, vandalizing property and spreading as many as 35 diseases.
    Author: Amanda Coletta, Anchorage Daily News, 28 Sep. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'brown rat.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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