smell a rat
smell a rat
Meaning:
- sense that something is not right
- suspect trickery or deception
- realize that something is not as supposed to be
- suspect that something wrong is happening
Example:
- When he made that offer, I smelt a rat. It sounded too good to be true.
- His wife smelt a rat when he suddenly started working late for the past few weeks.
- I don’t think these files were deleted by mistake. I smell a rat. Maybe he has something to do with it.
- The minute I walked in for the scheduled interview, I smelt a rat. Sure enough, it was a phoney company and intended to rip me off.
- He smelt a rat when his wife said she didn’t want to go on a vacation with him.
- The investment scheme looked a good one, but I smelt a rat when the adviser could not answer a few of my questions satisfactorily.
- I smelt a rat when I found some items missing from my desk.
Origin:
The origin of the phrase is not clear, however, it is believed that it refers to the smell of a dead rat, which is horrible and indicates that something is out of place.
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7 Thoughts
Smelt a rat OR Smelled a rat?
Smell has both an irregular and regular form. You can use both and both are correct. Brits use smelled and smelt interchangeably, but speakers in North America rarely use smelt.
But which is the most used one? Let´s look at Google Ngram Viewer tool which displays a graph showing how phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over the years.
Let´s look at the current online media:
New project to find out what Europe smelt like from 16-20th century – [BBC]
Yaoumbaev told CNN he smelt something extremely unpleasant –[CNN]
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