Word.ws English Dictionary

rat-trap cheese

rat-trap cheese noun: inexpensive unexceptional cheese.

Noun

rat-trap cheese (countable and uncountable, plural rat-trap cheeses)

  1. (US, informal) Inexpensive unexceptional cheese.
    • Near-synonym: government cheese (sometimes humorously synonymous)
    • Having spent twice as much money as I had intended during the first month in New York, I tried to live even more frugally than I had earlier in the year. I still ate rye bread and rat-trap cheese in my room, but less of it[…]1951, Erskine Caldwell, Call it Experience: The Years of Learning how to Write, page 112
    1. (US, informal) American cheese portrayed as such.

Synonyms of rat-trap cheese

Forms of rat-trap cheese

pluralrat-trap cheeses

Origin of rat-trap cheese

So called because it might be used in baiting a trap.

Questions about rat-trap cheese

What does rat-trap cheese mean?
Rat-trap cheese means inexpensive unexceptional cheese.
What part of speech is rat-trap cheese?
Rat-trap cheese is a noun.
What is the plural of rat-trap cheese?
The plural of rat-trap cheese is rat-trap cheeses.

Words near rat-trap cheese in the dictionary

  1. rat-tat
  2. rat-tat-tat
  3. rat-tat-tats
  4. rat-tats
  5. rat-trap
  6. rat-trap cheese
  7. rat-trap cheeses
  8. rata
  9. ratabilities
  10. ratability
  11. ratable

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rat-trap cheese (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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