plague-ridden

English

Etymology

plague +‎ ridden

Adjective

plague-ridden (comparative more plague-ridden, superlative most plague-ridden)

1. (of a place or community) Experiencing an epidemic or epidemics of bubonic plague or another illness.
   • 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, Illness as Metaphor, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Chapter 7, p. 55,^[2]

     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.”

2. (of a time) During which there is an epidemic or epidemics of bubonic plague or another illness.
   • 1990, Leonard Schulman, “Imagining Other Lives,” Time, 30 April, 1990,^[3]

     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.

3. (of a person, animal, body or object) Infected with or suffering from bubonic plague or another epidemic illness.
   • 1915, Rafael Sabatini, The Banner of the Bull: Three Episodes in the Career of Cesare Borgia, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, “The Perugian,” III, p. 125,^[5]

     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, “Biological Warfare: It is a grim threat, but new microbe detectors offer hope,” Life, 13 August, 1951,^[6]

     In the Middle Ages war parties sometimes dropped plague-ridden corpses into their enemies’ village wells.

   • 2001, John Waddington-Feather, The Marcham Mystery, Shrewsbury: Feather Books, 2006, Chapter Seven, p. 50,^[7]

     She picked up a letter from the table, handling it like a plague-ridden rag, and passed it to Hartley.

   • 2016, Abigail Tucker, “The spooky history of how cats bewitched us,” Washington Post, 31 October, 2016,^[8]

     Left in peace […] Europe’s cats might have pounced upon the plague-ridden rodents, saving the lives of tens of millions of people.