rotten borough
English
Noun
rotten borough (plural rotten boroughs)
- (historical) A borough that was represented in Parliament although it had very few voters.
- 1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 7, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC:
- Queen's Crawley was no longer so populous a place as it had been in Queen Bess's time—nay, was come down to that condition of borough which used to be denominated rotten–yet, as Sir Pitt Crawley would say with perfect justice in his elegant way, "Rotten! be hanged—it produces me a good fifteen hundred a year."
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Usage notes
- This term refers to Great Britain before 1832.
See also
References
- “rotten borough”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
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