Word.ws English Dictionary

region rat

region rat noun: an inhabitant of northwest Indiana.

Noun

region rat (plural region rats)

  1. (informal, Indiana) an inhabitant of northwest Indiana
    • Gingrich also fired, for no good reason, House Historian Raymond Smock, a former “Region Rat” who first introduced me to In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.1975, James B. Lane, Steel Shavings, volume 31, page 2
    • “Ask any region rat,” said Langbehn, referring to denizens of northwest Indiana. “When the wind is off the lake, you can smell it all the way down to Crown Point. It’s like a sulfur compound, clearly a steel-mill smell.”2004 July 1, Illinois Information Service Press Summary, issue

Examples of region rat in a sentence

  • She has accepted her fate as a lifelong Hoosier and Region Rat.2013, Paula Evans, Everybody Loves Amy, back cover
  • Tens of thousands of longtime residents here proudly wear the region rat reputation, and they will never see themselves as anything else, until death do them part.2017, Jerry Davich, Crooked Politics in Northwest Indiana, page 24:

Forms of region rat

pluralregion rats

Origin of region rat

From region + rat. Within Indiana, the northwest of the state is colloquially called the Region, originally short for the Calumet Region. The ‘rat’ appellation apparently derives from millrat as a pejorative term for steelworkers.

Questions about region rat

What does region rat mean?
Region rat means an inhabitant of northwest Indiana.
How do you use region rat in a sentence?
She has accepted her fate as a lifelong Hoosier and Region Rat.
What part of speech is region rat?
Region rat is a noun.
What is the plural of region rat?
The plural of region rat is region rats.

Words near region rat in the dictionary

  1. region free
  2. Region of Montreal
  3. Region of Peel
  4. Region of Queens
  5. Region of York
  6. region rat
  7. region rats
  8. region-beta paradox
  9. region-free
  10. region-locked
  11. region-wide

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: region rat (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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Cite this entry: “region rat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/region_rat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.