plague-ridden
English
editEtymology
editAdjective
editplague-ridden (comparative more plague-ridden, superlative most plague-ridden)
- 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,[1]
- 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.
- 1978, Susan Sontag, chapter 7, in Illness as Metaphor[2], New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, page 55:
- 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.”
- 1930, Henry Handel Richardson (pseudonym of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson), The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Book I, Australia Felix, Proem,[1]
- During which there is an epidemic or epidemics of bubonic plague or another illness. (of a time)
- 1990 April 30, Leonard Schulman, “Imagining Other Lives”, in Time[3], archived from the original on 14 August 2013:
- 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.
- 2011, Neil Howe and Richard Jackson, “Global Aging and the Crisis of the 2020’s,” investorsinsight.com, 12 January, 2011,[4]
- Russia will be in the midst of the steepest and most protracted population implosion of any major power since the plague-ridden Middle Ages.
- Infected with or suffering from bubonic plague or another epidemic illness. (of a person, animal, body or object)
- 1915, Rafael Sabatini, “The Perugian”, in The Banner of the Bull: Three Episodes in the Career of Cesare Borgia[5], Boston: Houghton Mifflin, III, p. 125:
- There was a saintly minorite, one Fra Cristofero, who came to tend the plague-ridden, and who himself was miraculously preserved from the contagion.
- 1951 August 13, “Biological Warfare: It is a grim threat, but new microbe detectors offer hope”, in Life:
- In the Middle Ages war parties sometimes dropped plague-ridden corpses into their enemies’ village wells.
- 2001, John Waddington-Feather, chapter 7, in The Marcham Mystery[6], Shrewsbury: Feather Books, published 2006, page 50:
- She picked up a letter from the table, handling it like a plague-ridden rag, and passed it to Hartley.
- 2016 October 31, Abigail Tucker, “The spooky history of how cats bewitched us”, in Washington Post:
- Left in peace […] Europe’s cats might have pounced upon the plague-ridden rodents, saving the lives of tens of millions of people.