Meaning
To begin to suspect that something is wrong or dishonest; to sense trickery or foul play from small clues before having any proof. The suspicion is instinctive rather than evidenced, and the phrase usually signals distrust of a person, an offer, or a story that seems too convenient. Informal and idiomatic; conveys instinctive distrust rather than confirmed wrongdoing. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The Phrase Finder places the idiom in 16th-century Britain. The Word Histories project traces the earliest known use to the anonymous satirical poem The Image of Ipocrysy, written around 1540, with the lines 'But then beware the catt; / For yf they smell a ratt'. The surrounding cat imagery points to the original picture: a cat detecting a hidden rat by smell alone, without ever seeing it, transferred to a person who senses that something is amiss. That reading is reinforced by Thomas Deloney's story of the late 1590s, in which one maidservant says 'I smell a Rat' and the other answers that she has as good a nose as 'our gray Cat'. The expression has kept the same core sense of instinctive suspicion from the 1500s to the present.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- can smell a rat
- smell rats
- smelling a rat
- smelt a rat (British past tense)
Usage Examples
- When the courier insisted on cash up front, the retired teacher began to smell a rat.
- Investors smelled a rat as soon as the company stopped publishing its accounts.
- There is something odd about that job listing, no firm name and no salary, and I smell a rat.