Contents

English

Etymology

Old French enheriter, from Late Latin inhereditare (“‘make heir’”).

Pronunciation

Verb

Infinitive to inherit

Third person singular inherits

Simple past inherited

Past participle inherited

Present participle inheriting

to inherit (third-person singular simple present inherits, present participle inheriting, simple past and past participle inherited)

  1. (transitive) To take possession of as a right (especially in Biblical translations).
    Your descendants will inherit the earth.
  2. (transitive) To receive (property or a title etc), by legal succession or bequest after the previous owner's death.
    After Grandad died, I inherited the house.
  3. (transitive) (biology) To receive a characteristic from one's ancestors by genetic transmission.
    Let's hope the baby inherits his mother's looks and his father's intelligence.
  4. (transitive) To derive from people or conditions previously in force.
    This country has inherited an invidious class culture.
  5. (intransitive) to come into an inheritance.
    Lucky old Daniel – his parents were both killed, and he's inherited.
  6. (computing, programming, transitive) To derive (existing functionality) from a superclass.
    ModalWindow inherits all the properties and methods of Window.
  7. (computing, programming, transitive) To derive a new class from (a superclass).
    • 2006, Daniel Solis, Illustrated C# 2005
      For example, the following two code segments, from different assemblies, show how easy it is to inherit a class from another assembly.

Derived terms

 

The above information uses material from Wiktionary and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Some facts may not have been fully verified for accuracy. [Disclaimers]
This page was last archived by our server on Wed Nov 4 04:15:38 2009. [ refresh local cache ]
Displaying this page or its contents does not use any Wikimedia Foundation's resources.
The owners of this site proudly support the Wikimedia Foundation.

[Hide]▼
[Hide]▲