MEANING
1. Passed from parents to offspring through genes rather than acquired through experience alone.
2. Passed from one generation to another as a title, office, rank, or right.
Use it for
distinguishing a genetic trait from an acquired habit; describing a family’s concern about inherited illness; avoiding the assumption that every shared family behaviour is geneticSeparates genetic transmission from the inheritance of a title or office, avoiding a misleading equation of biology and authority. Writing functions: Inheritance / Character.
Words that belong together
- a hereditary condition
- a hereditary trait
- hereditary factors
On the page
The family called his stubbornness hereditary, though the narrator offered no evidence for that claim.
Hereditary risk did not tell her what would happen to any one member of the family.
The title was hereditary; the authority to command the town was not.
She accepted the portrait as an heirloom but refused the hereditary office it represented.
Word forms
- Base
- hereditary
Usage notes
Usually non-gradable adjective. Hereditary, not more hereditary, in ordinary classification. No regular comparative or superlative. Register: neutral. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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