frat rat
1
9.9
- noun
- /fræt ræt/
- Offensive
:
miembro de una fraternidad
- As a proud frat rat, he rarely attended classes and preferred social events over studying.
Examples
-
Many people believe that being a frat rat can lead to missing out on valuable opportunities in college.
-
What do you expect from a frat rat administration?
Blog text (30) -
Believe me we will know when each one of those frat rats is killed.
-
He collected information the way frat rats collected coeds' phone numbers.
Fiction book (2001) -
He spent almost every weekend partying with his frat rat friends instead of studying for his exams.
Synonyms
A person who belongs to a college fraternity and joins its social activities
How Masculine
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound follows an English colloquial pattern (like 'gym rat' or 'mall rat') where 'rat' extends metaphorically to mean a person who spends a lot of time with or is obsessed by the preceding noun, so a learner who recognises that pattern could infer 'frat rat' as someone heavily involved in fraternity social life. However, 'frat' is slang and 'rat' also has competing senses (betrayer, animal), so the exact social/pejorative nuance is not fully predictable without exposure.
Etymology
Frat rat comes from frat (short for 'fraternity') and rat, a word used in 'gym rat' to mean someone who spends a lot of time in one place. The image is of a student who hangs around the fraternity house so much they seem to live there, so the phrase means a student who spends too much time on fraternity social life.