Dictionary

plague-ridden en · ADJ

Pronunciation

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Etymology

From plague + ridden.

Meanings

1. Experiencing an epidemic or epidemics of bubonic plague or another illness. (of a place or community)
   • 1930, Henry Handel Richardson (pseudonym of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson), The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Book I, Australia Felix, Proem, That was in the days of the first great stampede to the goldfields, when the embryo seaports were as empty as though they were plague-ridden, and every man who had the use of his legs was on the wide bush-track, bound for the north.
   • In the plague-ridden England of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, according to the historian Keith Thomas, it was widely believed that “the happy man would not get plague.” 1978, Susan Sontag, chapter 7, in Illness as Metaphor, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, page 55:
2. During which there is an epidemic or epidemics of bubonic plague or another illness. (of a time)
   • 2011, Neil Howe and Richard Jackson, “Global Aging and the Crisis of the 2020’s,” investorsinsight.com, 12 January, 2011, Russia will be in the midst of the steepest and most protracted population implosion of any major power since the plague-ridden Middle Ages.
   • The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) chronicles gay life through the liberated 1960s; if White lives long enough, he hopes to complete the series with novels about the frenzied bathhouse ’70s and the plague-ridden ’80s. 1990 April 30, Leonard Schulman, “Imagining Other Lives”, in Time, archived from the original on 14 Aug 2013:
3. Infected with or suffering from bubonic plague or another epidemic illness. (of a person, animal, body or object)
   • She picked up a letter from the table, handling it like a plague-ridden rag, and passed it to Hartley. 2001, John Waddington-Feather, chapter 7, in The Marcham Mystery, Shrewsbury: Feather Books, published 2006, page 50:
   • In the Middle Ages war parties sometimes dropped plague-ridden corpses into their enemies’ village wells. 1951 August 13, “Biological Warfare: It is a grim threat, but new microbe detectors offer hope”, in Life:
   • There was a saintly minorite, one Fra Cristofero, who came to tend the plague-ridden, and who himself was miraculously preserved from the contagion. 1915, Rafael Sabatini, “The Perugian”, in The Banner of the Bull: Three Episodes in the Career of Cesare Borgia, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, III, p. 125:
   • Left in peace […] Europe’s cats might have pounced upon the plague-ridden rodents, saving the lives of tens of millions of people. 2016 October 31, Abigail Tucker, “The spooky history of how cats bewitched us”, in Washington Post:

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