rotten borough

1. 1.

   an English parliamentary constituency with few electors

   Broaderborough

Questions about rotten borough

What does rotten borough mean?

rotten borough means "an English parliamentary constituency with few electors".

Is rotten borough a common word?

rotten borough is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.