inheritance
/ɪnˈhɛɹɪtəns/ noun C1- The passing of title to an estate upon death.
- That which a person is entitled to inherit, by law or testament, such as the part of an estate (i.e., a portion).
- 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.
- The biological attributes passed hereditarily from ancestors to their offspring.
- The mechanism whereby parts of a superclass are available to instances of its subclass.
Plural inheritances
From the library
She was a very pretty little girl, with her mother’s black eyes and hair, and rosy cheeks, and the merry expression which was her inheritance from her father.
Indeed, I expected it, for it is a family inheritance; both my father and grandfather died of it in a third attack.
But the inheritance consisted in this only, a scrap of paper on which Spada had written:—‘I bequeath to my beloved nephew my coffers, my books, and, amongst others, my breviary with the gold corners, which I beg he will preserve in remembrance of his affectionate uncle.’
“I was then almost assured that the inheritance had neither profited the Borgias nor the family, but had remained unpossessed like the treasures of the Arabian Nights, which slept in the bosom of the earth under the eyes of the genie.
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