rotten borough

English

WOTD – 14 September 2023

Etymology

An aerial view of Old Sarum in Wiltshire, England, United Kingdom. Old Sarum was one of the most notorious rotten boroughs (sense 1)—by the 17th century it had no residents, but the Pitt family which owned the land had the right to nominate non-resident tenants for plots of land who then voted for two Members of Parliament as the Pitts directed.

From rotten (“in a state of decay”) +‎ borough (“type of administrative district”), because such boroughs were regarded as having “decayed” due to their voters moving away to other places.^[1]

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˌɹɒtn̩ ˈbʌɹə/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˌɹɑtn̩ ˈbʌɹoʊ/, /-ˈbɜ-/, [ˌɹɑʔn̩-]

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ʌɹə
• Hyphenation: rot‧ten bor‧ough

Noun

rotten borough (plural rotten boroughs) (chiefly UK, politics)

2. (historical) A parliamentary borough that was represented in Parliament although the number of voters had diminished so greatly that they were largely controlled by the main landowner; such boroughs were abolished in the 19th century. [from mid 18th c.]
   • [1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, “Crawley of Queen’s Crawley”, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC, page 57:

     […] 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."]

3. (by extension) A parliamentary constituency or electoral district in a similar situation.

Hypernyms

• nomination borough
• proprietorial borough

Coordinate terms

• close borough
• pocket borough

Translations

parliamentary borough represented in Parliament although the number of voters had diminished so greatly they were largely controlled by the main landowner; parliamentary constituency or electoral district in a similar situation

Basque: burgu usteldu Bulgarian: гнил район m (gnil rajon) Chinese: Mandarin: 腐敗選區／腐败选区 (fǔbàixuǎnqū) Finnish: lahonnut kauppala French: bourg pourri (fr) m Galician: please add this translation if you can Hebrew: מחוז רקוב ומחוז כיס ? Italian: borgo putrido m Japanese: 腐敗選挙区 (ふはいせんきょく, fuhaisenkyoku) Macedonian: гнил ре́он m (gnil réon) Norwegian: Bokmål: råtten valgkrets m, lommevalgkrets m Polish: zgniłe miasteczko n Russian: гнило́е месте́чко (gnilóje mestéčko) Serbo-Croatian: Cyrillic: please add this translation if you can Roman: please add this translation if you can Spanish: burgo podrido m Ukrainian: please add this translation if you can

See also

• safe seat

References

1. “rotten borough, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022; see also “rotten borough, n.” under “rotten, adj., n., and adv.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2023.

Further reading

• rotten and pocket boroughs on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “rotten borough, n.”, in Collins English Dictionary.
• “rotten borough, n.”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present, reproduced from Stuart Berg Flexner, editor in chief, Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd edition, New York, N.Y.: Random House, 1993, →ISBN.
• “rotten borough, n.”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.