Hereditary

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /həˈɹɛdɪt(ə)ɹi/

Definitions

1. Passed down from parents to offspring through genetic material or family tradition
2. Relating to characteristics or conditions transmitted from ancestors to descendants by genetic inheritance or familial lineage
3. Associated with attributes or traits that are inherited rather than acquired, often implying a lineage or family connection

Etymology: Hereditary is a word that took its shape from the Roman law of property, where an heir was the person who stepped into a dead man's estate. The Latin "hērēs" meant "heir", and "hērēditās" meant the inheritance itself, the goods and debts passed down with them. From these came "hērēditārius", a legal adjective for things that passed by inheritance, and that is the form English eventually borrowed, through Middle English "hereditarie". The surprise lies in how far the word has travelled from inheritance law. A trait such as eye colour or a tendency to a disease is not something anyone signs over in a will, yet the same term describes it, because the underlying idea is transmission from one generation to the next. The sense of a biological trait passed from parent to offspring is a metaphorical extension of the legal meaning, applied to features that arrive by descent rather than by bequest.

Synonyms: genetic, inherited, ancestral, familial, lineal

Antonyms: acquired, nonhereditary, environmental, random, spontaneous