inherit

The core legal sense came through Old French from Late Latin inhereditare, "to make heir," and displaced the native Old English verb ierfan. The heir is always the subject. The grandchild inherits the house, while the grandparent leaves or bequeaths it, so inherit and bequeath describe one transfer from opposite ends. A title passes the same way as land, and so, half-jokingly, does a beautiful Inverness cloak in Margery Allingham's The China Governess (1963).

Biology borrowed the language of wills for what passes down through genes: looks, height, a predisposition to disease. The construction mirrors the legal one, since a child inherits a trait from a parent. But nothing is handed over at death, and traits can come from both sides at once, as with a baby who has his mother's looks and his father's intelligence.

The successor's sense: what comes down is a situation, and it is rarely welcome. It might be an economy near recession, an invidious class culture or a predecessor's habits. Nothing requires a death, because a new government or a new employee inherits simply by taking over. The word often carries a quiet disclaimer, placing the problem's origin with whoever came before.

Here the object drops away and the verb names the event itself. "He's inherited" means he has come into money, with no need to say what. The intransitive use leans on context, such as a rich grandfather's death or a family will, to supply the rest. When the estate or the share is worth naming, the sentence returns to the transitive legal sense.

Nobody has to die for this kind of inheritance. What is received is owed by right or by promise, usually the earth or a land. The sense lives chiefly in Biblical translation, which is why it so often sounds prophetic and comes with shall or will, as in "the meek shall inherit the earth." Using it elsewhere borrows that scriptural ring.

Object-oriented programming gave the word a precise technical job. Here the subject is the class itself: ModalWindow inherits the properties and methods of Window, or simply inherits from it. What is inherited can be reused as is or overridden in the subclass. Keep this use apart from the programmer's use, where a person does the inheriting and the superclass becomes the object.

The same act seen from the keyboard: the programmer is the subject and the base class is what gets inherited. Daniel Solis's Illustrated C# 2005 (2006) shows how easy it is to inherit a class from another assembly. There the from-phrase names where the parent class lives, not the parent itself, which can trip up readers used to the class-as-subject use.