overcrowded

adjective

over·​crowd·​ed ˌō-vər-ˈkrau̇-dəd 

: crowded or filled to excess : having too many people or things

overcrowded streets/cities/classrooms

living in overcrowded conditions

… having an overcrowded space can make it hard for buyers to … visualize their own belongings in the space, said Los Angeles-based designer Francesca Grace.

—Jennifer Tzeses

… some 5 million workers commute for up to three hours on trains so overcrowded that there seem to be as many passengers hanging on to the outside of the carriages as there are inside.

—Ismail Merchant

Examples of overcrowded in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

When police departments expand too quickly, academies become overcrowded, instructor-to-trainee ratios worsen, and field training officers are stretched thin. —Karl W. Bickel, Baltimore Sun, 6 Jan. 2026

Wells had to add some bumps to the emergency room choreography to reflect the reality of an overcrowded ER filled with medical students. —Bryan Alexander, USA Today, 5 Jan. 2026

Highways, viaducts, giant interchanges, and a major Metro junction viciously mutilated São Paulo’s downtown in the 1960s and ’70s, demoting it from a popular residential area to a commercial transfer hub, overcrowded and polluted by day but forlorn by night. —Michaëla De Lacaze Mohrmann, Artforum, 1 Jan. 2026

And for many people, that overcrowded, overstuffed feeling the home can take on during the holidays thanks to all those decorations, presents and food platters, gives way to a burst of get rid of it all! —Jolie Kerr, Washington Post, 1 Jan. 2026

Word History

Etymology

from past participle of overcrowd

First Known Use

1725, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for overcrowded

• clouded
• crowded
• shrouded
• enshrouded
• unclouded
• uncrowded