Disheritaunce

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The archaic legal act of cutting someone off from their rightful inheritance and removing their claim to family property
2. An old term for the deprivation of a person's right to inherit land, goods or a title from their family
3. Historically, the action of disowning an heir so that they lose the estate or property they would otherwise receive

Etymology: Disinheritance is the modern word, and "disheritaunce" is its older spelling, the form English used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It came into English from Anglo-Norman "desheritaunce," which was built on the verb "desheriter," meaning to cut someone off from an inheritance. That verb is the Old French "desheriter," formed from the prefix "des-" (undoing or removing) and "heriter," to inherit, which in turn came from Latin "hereditas," heirship. The Middle English form's spelling reflects its French ancestry: the "-aunce" ending is the same suffix seen in words like "variance" and "allowance," a nominal ending that turns a verb into a noun for an action or state. So the word literally names the act or condition of having one's inheritance taken away. Its earliest uses in English were largely legal, concerning land and rights of succession, which is why it remained a term of property law long before it came to suggest family estrangement.