Talk:inheritable

Is this word ever confused with "heritable"?

The word inflammable has gained some notoriety for (counter-intuitively) being not an antonym, but a synonym, for flammable. The same thing applies to inhabitable, but seemingly to a lesser degree. You can sometimes get away with saying the second, but Google NGram shows that the base form (flammable and habitable) are 5x or 10x more common in both cases. I can't seem to see if the same confusion applies to inheritable and heritable. I searched for "heritable vs inheritable" and although it is popular enough to be a search prediction or suggestion, most of the results seem to be about their difference in the study of genetics and not in the study of linguistics like the results for "flammable vs inflammable" and "habitable vs inhabitable" are. Google NGram still shows that "heritable" outnumbered "inheritable" by a factor of five, but clearly, common usage is not a yardstick for determining the viability of a word. Dictionary.com has a usage caution for "inflammable" but there is no usage note for either "inhabitable" or "inheritable." This common errors' guide has an entry for "inflammable," downright skunking the word, but has no entry for either "inhabitable" or "inheritable." Inner Focus (talk) 17:01, 20 February 2021 (UTC)