Word.ws English Dictionary

heir-loom

heir-loom is the alternative form of heirloom.

Meaning of heirloom

Noun

heirloom (plural heirlooms)

  1. A valued possession that has been passed down through the generations.
    • Morning rehearsal starts at eleven. Wheeler takes a taxi from the hotel to the venue, bringing his tuxedo and his violin with him. His violin is an heirloom, more than a hundred years old, and while he's touring it never leaves his sight. (His tuxedo is just a tuxedo.)2019 April 10, qntm, “CASE HATE RED”, in There Is No Antimemetics Division, →ISBN, page 135
    Synonyms:
    patrimony
  2. An old crop variety that has been passed down through generations of farmers by seed saving and cultivation, in contrast to modern cultivars used in large-scale agriculture.
    • My last trip to the market barely yielded enough unmealy heirlooms for a couple of salads.2009 August 19, Melissa Clark, “Plums Rescue a Seasonal Favorite”, in New York Times

Forms of heir-loom

pluralheir-looms

Questions about heir-loom

What is heir-loom the alternative form of?
Heir-loom is the alternative form of heirloom.

Words near heir-loom in the dictionary

  1. heir at law
  2. heir by custom
  3. heir general
  4. heir presumptive
  5. heir-at-law
  6. heir-loom
  7. heir-looms
  8. heirdom
  9. heirdoms
  10. heire
  11. heired

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: heir-loom (page history and authors); heirloom (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “heir-loom.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/heir-loom. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.