Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
a. (alternative spelling of overripe English)
Usage examples of "over-ripe".
He remembered it as an Indian shop where safaris stocked up with wine and liquor, fresh vegetables and tinned goods, but it had been Africanized long ago and now the shelves were largely bare, only local produce sold, sacks of maize flour they called posho, melons over-ripe and crawling with flies, root vegetables I had never seen before.
The cucumbers cumber the ground,--great yellow, over-ripe objects, no more to be compared to the crisp beauty of their youth than is the fat swine of the sty to the clean little pig.
Matilda slipped down from the tree, took possession of the donation, and proceeded to pick up a handful of over-ripe medlars from the grass at her feet.
Opposite his mother in the cab going home, Val tasted the afterfruits of heroism, like medlars over-ripe.
Most of the windows were broken, the cream facing tiles covered by huge patches of fungus, and the whole complex looked like an over-ripe camembert cheese.
For the bulk of this century a favoured organism for geneticists to study, because of the ease with which it can be maintained, its rapid breeding cycle and the possibility of studying populations of many thousands, has been the tiny fruit fly (sometimes called vinegar fly), Drosophila melanogaster, which gathers like specks of coal dust, seemingly magnetically attracted to over-ripe fruit.
He’d laid down a field of mushy scarlets and ochers, like the guts of an over-ripe pomegranate, and then stroked the details of Wyckoff Street over this seething backcloth, the grays and sepias of brick and iron and asphalt never completely concealing the rotted hues beneath, so that for all the carefully rendered detail, Wyckoff Street looked like a veil drawn over a more insistent and powerful reality.