inheritance
English
Alternative forms
- enheritance, enheritaunce, inheritaunce (obsolete)
- inhæritance (obsolete, hypercorrect)
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English enheritaunce, inheritaunce, borrowed from Anglo-Norman, Old French enheritaunce, from enheriter. By surface analysis, inherit + -ance.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ɪnˈhɛɹɪtəns/
Audio (US): (file)
Noun
inheritance (countable and uncountable, plural inheritances)
- The passing of title to an estate upon death.
- (countable) That which a person is entitled to inherit, by law or testament, such as the part of an estate (i.e., a portion).
- (uncountable, especially linguistics, biology) The act or mechanism of inheriting; the state of having inherited.
- The Indo-European languages share various similarities as a result of their inheritance from a common ancestor.
- (biology, genetic algorithms) The biological attributes passed hereditarily from ancestors to their offspring.
- (programming, object-oriented programming) The mechanism whereby parts of a superclass are available to instances of its subclass.
Hyponyms
Hyponyms (computing)
- classical inheritance
- dual inheritance
- dynamic inheritance
- multiple inheritance
- parasitic inheritance
- prototypal inheritance
- static inheritance
- Swiss inheritance
Derived terms
Related terms
Translations
passing of title
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that which a person is entitled to inherit
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biological attributes passed to offspring
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programming: mechanism for making parts of superclass available to subclass
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- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked
Further reading
- Douglas Harper (2001–2025) “inheritance”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.
Middle English
Noun
inheritance
- alternative form of enheritaunce