inheritance

Etymology

Recorded since 1473, inherit + -ance. More at inherit.

noun

1. The passing of title to an estate upon death.
2. (countable) That which a person is entitled to inherit, by law or testament.
3. (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.
4. (biology, genetic algorithms) The biological attributes passed hereditarily from ancestors to their offspring.
5. (programming, object-oriented programming) The mechanism whereby parts of a superclass are available to instances of its subclass.