DRY-ROT • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Dry-rot

... pillars, leaving an open space for light and air beneath. Nearly every day it rains for an hour in torrents. The hot, steaming earth absorbs the water, and the fierce equatorial sun evaporates it, only to return it in a like shower the next day. So every precaution must be taken against dampness and dry-rot. ...

— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman

... other "passed" midshipmen, and great was the shaking of heads among old stagers over the danger that ship was to run. If this were exceptional, it would not be worth quoting, but it was not. A similar routine in the British navy, in a dry-rot period of a hundred years before, had induced a like head-wagging and exchange of views when one of its greatest admirals, Hawke, was first given charge of a squadron; being then already a man of mark, and four years older than Nelson at the ...

— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan