plague-ridden

plague +‎ ridden

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,

     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,

     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,

     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,

     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,

     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,

     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,

     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,

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