How to Use brown rat in a Sentence

brown rat

noun
  • The footage revealed a new apex predator in the brown rat.
    — Sarah Durn, Popular Science, 30 Oct. 2025
  • Pack rats, as well as their cousins the black and brown rats, don’t just collect sticks and seeds.
    — Sadie Witkowski, Smithsonian, 15 Nov. 2019
  • Unlike the brown rat, the black rat is known to have carried plague through fleas on its body.
    — Madeleine Schwartz, The New York Review of Books, 27 July 2023
  • Some people speculate that the brown rat saved us from the plague.
    — Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, 26 Apr. 2021
  • For the first time, a brown rat has been caught on camera actively hunting bats.
    — Sarah Durn, Popular Science, 30 Oct. 2025
  • Then, the most prevalent species was the brown rat or Rattus norvegicus.
    — Eduardo Cuevas, USA TODAY, 6 Oct. 2024
  • The city’s rat is a Rattus norvegicus, also known as the brown rat, wharf rat, or sewer rat.
    — Madeleine Schwartz, The New York Review of Books, 27 July 2023
  • Seoul spreads among and from the common brown rat—sometimes called a sewer rat, wharf rat, or Norway rat.
    — Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 4 Mar. 2022
  • Now researchers are shedding light on why brown rats are the undisputed winners of the real rat race.
    — CBS News, 4 Apr. 2024
  • Scientists used to think that brown rats arrived around 1776.
    — CBS News, 4 Apr. 2024
  • For example, brown rats typically burrow in the ground, near humans.
    — Eduardo Cuevas, USA TODAY, 6 Oct. 2024
  • The Vancouver Rat Project found that, in a typical day, the city’s brown rats stay within the length of a city block.
    — WIRED, 7 Oct. 2023
  • The two most widespread and infamous rat species are the black rat (Rattus rattus) and brown rat (Rattus norvegicus).
    — WIRED, 7 Oct. 2023
  • For comparison purposes, the modern brown rat is less than one foot in length and weighs approximately 8 ounces.
    — Fox News, 15 Feb. 2020
  • The lowly brown rat, by contrast, is a nimble navigator that has no problem finding its way around, under, over, and through the toughest spaces.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 1 June 2017
  • The recovery follows the removal of black and brown rats that had accidentally arrived on the island as stowaways on ships and shipwrecks.
    — Moná Thomas, PEOPLE, 2 July 2026
  • Perhaps in part because of this, brown rats have been found to consistently prefer rewards that benefit others, as opposed to just themselves.
    — Oliver Whang, New York Times, 27 Feb. 2023
  • In our study, the commonest wild animal detected in New York City waters was the brown rat, a common urban denizen.
    — Mark Stoeckle, Smithsonian, 13 Apr. 2017
  • The past decade has seen a boom in descriptions of unexpected pollinators, including lizards, opossums, brown rats and cockroaches.
    — Asher Elbein, Scientific American, 6 May 2023
  • But the history, evolution and ecology of rats – particularly the brown rat – isn’t well understood.
    — Nathan Rott, NPR, 20 Sep. 2024
  • Its programs use African Giant Pouched Rats, which have a longer lifespan in captivity of around eight years compared to the four years of the common brown rat.
    — Rebecca Cairns, CNN, 24 Oct. 2022
  • The extinct animal is also closely related to a living rat species, sharing around 95 percent of its genome with the Norway brown rat, according to the study.
    — NBC News, 9 Mar. 2022
  • Humans brought brown rats to North America, destroyed the habitat of potential predators and created environments where rats could thrive.
    — Oliver Whang, New York Times, 27 Feb. 2023
  • Between the species, brown rat bones had a higher delta-N-15 ratio than black rats across sites, suggesting the brown rats were eating more animal protein than their smaller competitors.
    — Lauren Leffer, Popular Science, 3 Apr. 2024
  • Hiding inside ships, the brown rat made its way to Europe in the 1500s and then to the Western hemisphere, Africa and Australia as colonizers arrived.
    — María Luisa Paúl, Washington Post, 2 Dec. 2022
  • Rattus norvegicus - the brown rat - is a destructive force in much of the world, wreaking ecological havoc, contaminating crops, vandalizing property and spreading as many as 35 diseases.
    — Author: Amanda Coletta, Anchorage Daily News, 28 Sep. 2019
  • Since then about 500 generations of brown rats have lived here and have developed unique genetic adaptations related to metabolism, diet, nervous system and locomotion.
    — Deni Ellis Béchard, Scientific American, 13 Sep. 2025
  • The team collected museum specimens for the brown rat, house mouse, Eastern grey squirrel, Eastern chipmunk, muskrat, white-footed mouse, fox squirrel and Southern flying squirrel, making anatomical measurements of each for statistical comparisons.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN Money, 16 Oct. 2025
  • Virtually all of these are Rattus norvegicus—the brown rat, aka the Norway rat—a larger and more robust species than the black rat (Rattus rattus), which arrived first on ships in the 1600s but was displaced by the brown rat in the 1700s.
    — Deni Ellis Béchard, Scientific American, 13 Sep. 2025
  • The two most commonly found in urban areas are the black rat (Rattus rattus), which originated in India about 3,000 years ago, and the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), which hails from Mongolia and China and probably didn’t arrive in Europe until around the 1300s.
    — Jason Bittel, Big Think, 31 Mar. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'brown rat.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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