pack rat

noun

Definition of pack rat

1 : wood rat especially : a bushy-tailed rodent (Neotoma cinerea) of western North America that has well-developed cheek pouches and that hoards food and miscellaneous objects

2 : a person who collects or hoards especially unneeded items

Examples of pack rat in a Sentence

I'm a terrible pack rat. I never throw anything away.

Recent Examples on the Web Luckily for history’s sake, Glenn was something of a pack rat, saving everything from elementary school drawings to class papers to his post-Mercury notes about space travel — all of it housed at the John Glenn Archives at Ohio State. — Washington Post, 28 May 2021 The Rat Pack connoisseur confesses to being a bit of a pack rat. — Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times, 12 May 2021 The vibe was more pack rat than Rat Pack, though the Saturn Bar drew celebrities out slumming for a night in New Orleans, and their snapshots were tacked to the wall. — Ian Mcnulty, NOLA.com, 20 Nov. 2020 Joshua trees were once dispersed across landscapes with help from ancient pack rats and elephant-size giant ground sloths, a finding based on the abundance of seeds found in fossilized dung. — Los Angeles Times, 13 Apr. 2020 Wolfram, a digital pack rat, has also recorded many of the brainstorming meetings between himself and his collaborators and is releasing 430 hours or so of videos. — Steven Levy, Wired, 14 Apr. 2020 The pack rat might fill a storage space or overwhelm an attic. — Jessica Ravitz And Sandee Lamotte, CNN, 2 Mar. 2020 Those of us who have been labeled pack rats are really more on the bunny side in the kingdom of analogies. — Lynn Petrak, chicagotribune.com, 2 Oct. 2019 Anthony Bourdain was not a pack rat or a collector. — Tim Carman, Washington Post, 9 Oct. 2019

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'pack rat.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.