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

This one reclassifies: One person’s pack rat is another’s collector. — Wesley Morris, New York Times, "Review: In ‘Saving Brinton,’ an Inveterate Accumulator Finds Treasure," 17 May 2018 By all accounts, Hemingway — trailblazer of the spare prose style — was a pack rat. — Patrick J. Mcdonnell, latimes.com, "Preservation effort makes Hemingway's Cuba home look like he never left," 30 May 2018 What was surprising, and helpful to the journalists, was that some former Exxon employees turned out to be pack rats and had kept copies of decades-old reports. — Reeves Wiedeman, Daily Intelligencer, "The Rockefellers vs. the Company That Made Them Rockefellers," 7 Jan. 2018 In this case, senior staff photographer Taimy Alvarez, a 19-year-veteran and a pack rat, was reminded by a friend (who was scouring the internet after Kelly's remarks) that Alvarez had actually covered the April 10, 2015 FBI event. — James Warren, The Hive, "How a Two-Year-Old Video Cost John Kelly His Credibility," 24 Oct. 2017

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.