Dictionary

misinherit en · VERB

Etymology

From mis- + inherit.

Meanings

1. To inherit incorrectly.
   • This prepared a legacy that the further acquaintance of the seventeenth century could only misinherit because seventeenth-century American settlers concentrated on "developing" the land, not on describing it. 1966, Peter A. Fritzell, Landscapes of Anglo-America During Exploration and Early Settlement, page 3:
   • And this incongruence of the inner constitution of man's soul is invincible and universal: his nature is a disordered jumble of misinherited tendencies. 1891, Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, Riddles of the Sphinx: A Study in the Philosophy of Evolution, page 104:
   • He confessed at the last that he had betrayed the trust of the dead, and misinherited a fortune . 1900, Charles Dickens, Andrew Lang, Christmas stories, page 333:
   • You might come to see the well ventilated dwellings of Shelley's imagination as striving toward an unguarded welcoming of, and trusting commitment to that human “breath made words,” which is our terms as our (Kantian) conditions (what we say together) and what together we so routinely and endemically misuse and misinherit, but not without the thereby accumulating potentiality of an aversive recoil into the exits of desire that has “been expressed at any time only by breathers of words, mortals, [so that] their strokes may be given now , and may gather together now-- in a recoiling-- all the power of world-creating words" (pp. 25). 2013, Edward T. Duffy, Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism, page 167:

Forms