Rot·ten a.  Having rotted; putrid; decayed; as, a rotten apple; rotten meat. Hence: (a) Offensive to the smell; fetid; disgusting.
 You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
 As reek of the rotten fens.   --Shak.
 (b) Not firm or trusty; unsound; defective; treacherous; unsafe; as, a rotten plank, bone, stone. “The deepness of the rotten way.”
 Rotten borough. See under Borough.
 Rotten stone Min., a soft stone, called also Tripoli (from the country from which it was formerly brought), used in all sorts of finer grinding and polishing in the arts, and for cleaning metallic substances. The name is also given to other friable siliceous stones applied to like uses.
 Syn: -- Putrefied; decayed; carious; defective; unsound; corrupt; deceitful; treacherous.
 -- Rot*ten*ly, adv. -- Rot*ten*ness, n.

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 Bor·ough n.
 1. In England, an incorporated town that is not a city; also, a town that sends members to parliament; in Scotland, a body corporate, consisting of the inhabitants of a certain district, erected by the sovereign, with a certain jurisdiction; in America, an incorporated town or village, as in Pennsylvania and Connecticut.
 2. The collective body of citizens or inhabitants of a borough; as, the borough voted to lay a tax.
 Close borough, or  Pocket borough, a borough having the right of sending a member to Parliament, whose nomination is in the hands of a single person.
 Rotten borough, a name given to any borough which, at the time of the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, contained but few voters, yet retained the privilege of sending a member to Parliament.


 rotten borough
      n : an English parliamentary constituency with few electors