overcrowded

adjective

over·​crowd·​ed ˌō-vər-ˈkrau̇-dəd 

: crowded or filled to excess : having too many people or things

overcrowded streets/cities/classrooms

living in overcrowded conditions

… having an overcrowded space can make it hard for buyers to … visualize their own belongings in the space, said Los Angeles-based designer Francesca Grace.

—Jennifer Tzeses

… some 5 million workers commute for up to three hours on trains so overcrowded that there seem to be as many passengers hanging on to the outside of the carriages as there are inside.

—Ismail Merchant

Examples of overcrowded in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Here are the top stories: About three dozen Jefferson County Public Schools were overcrowded at the start of this school year, while a smaller share of schools were at less than 70% capacity, our analysis found. —Ray Padilla, The Courier-Journal, 31 Dec. 2024

Few towns and cities have their own holding facilities, and county jails are often already overcrowded. —Ray Stern, The Arizona Republic, 30 Dec. 2024

Thousands of Syrians were detained without trial, many of them held in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, often for years. —Raja Krishnamoorthi, Newsweek, 15 Dec. 2024

View More Sun City is a retirement nirvana, a suburban dreamscape for a class of people who, only a generation before, were typically isolated, institutionalized, or crammed into their kids’ overcrowded apartments. —Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic, 10 Dec. 2024

Word History

Etymology

from past participle of overcrowd

First Known Use

1725, in the meaning defined above