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View synonyms for

smell a rat

  1. To sense foul play: “They claim they will honor the terms of the contract, but I smell a rat.”


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Idioms and Phrases

Suspect something is wrong, especially a betrayal of some kind. For example, When I didn't hear any more from my prospective employer, I began to smell a rat . This expression alludes to a cat sniffing out a rat. [c. 1550]
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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

For any of this representative democracy stuff to work, it has to mean something when GOP politicians look up from nibbling on the scraps of the president's long-forgotten past grievances and say, "I smell a rat."

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Did you smell a rat in Season 1?

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She speaks like a refugee from a 1940s potboiler — “Something’s fishy here. I smell a rat” and “Listen, Slick, nothing would make me happier than to put that girl in a box marked return to sender” — but with a patina of acquired elegance.

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"By the end of the message, she seemed to have worked herself into a complete frenzy and was throwing around wild accusations. 'I smell a rat here. It is more than the usual red tape, incompetence and bureaucracy. That's expected! I believe there is corruption here at the highest levels'," he said.

From

"I know enough to smell a rat. There's something going on here that they're not telling us. I just don't know what it is."

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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