rat race
12
4.0
- noun
- /ræt reɪs/
- Informal
:
carrera frenética
- Many people feel trapped in the rat race and long for a simpler life.
- quit the rat race
- tired of the rat race
- rat race life
I would have been out of the rat race so much sooner.
- I would have been out of the rat race so much sooner.
- This is basically how Robert and I went from the rat race to being financially free.
- And do you know what the rat race is like?
- And I love directors, hate studios in that rat race of the film composing world.
- I pray for every night, by the way, stuck in the rat race.
- But you know, there's a saying, at the end of the day, you can win the rat race, but you'll still be a rat.
- What do you think that speaks to is it, you know, the idea that we're stuck in a, you know, a kind of rat race or a status trap?
- Maybe I'm going to pay off investment property so I'm free of the financial rat race and burden that people get into.
- I got caught up in in this rat race, you know, and caught up in a game that I don't even know.
- But anyway, the reason for it was I wanted to show people how to get out of the rat race.
- You know, I don't want to call it a rat race, but we're so caught up in, you know, the mundaneness.
- Amid the meetings and the papers and the career rat race and all the awards, let's not let ourselves lose that childlike wander.
- You know, a lot of people, we, we, we don't do that because we get caught up in the constant rat race of just living day-to-day.
- And my worry is that most people fall into the rat race and they never actually ask the question, why am I doing this?
- Running the rat race will lead to your demise.
- A rat can never get out of a rat race because a rat needs the cheese.
- I got caught in that rat race and now Eden bought a brand new house out of Cali.
Examples
-
I know everybody is in a hurry to work, ready to begin another day in this rat race.
Fiction book (2000) -
Unfortunately, you have been caught up in the rat race that is college admissions.
Blog text (18) -
And do you know what the rat race is like?
-
A chance to get out of this rat race.
-
'Why be caught up in the rat race of city life'
-
Just got tired of the rat race.
-
Now that I'm about to graduate university, the rat race really has come closer than ever.
Blog text (8) -
We'd get away from the rat race.
-
For example, many people have been seduced into the corporate rat race by the lure of power and money.
Fiction book (1992) -
Get your head out of the rat race... and forget about the superficial things that preoccupy your existence... and get back to what's important now.
Antonyms
How Competitive
Surface Forms
Morphology
The component 'race' clearly evokes competition, which is transparent, but 'rat' does not straightforwardly signal an exhausting, dehumanizing routine; the phrase relies on a metaphor comparing people to rats caught in a repetitive contest. This figurative link and the specific sense of an oppressive, monotonous work-life are not fully predictable from the parts alone, so a B1 learner who knows the words would likely not infer the full idiomatic meaning without exposure.
Etymology
Rat race may come from the image of rats running on a wheel or through a maze, always moving but going nowhere. People used that picture to describe a life of nonstop, pointless work and competition, so it now means 'a tiring, endless competition'.