RichThesaurus
poor as a church mouse
vs
poor as a rat
poor as a church mouse
adj
Very poor, to the point of starving or begging; utterly destitute.
poor as a rat
adj
Synonym of poor as a church mouse
How often have the words
poor as a church mouse
and
poor as a rat
occurred in a corpus of books?
(source:
Google Ngram Viewer
)