misinherit

English

Etymology

mis- +‎ inherit

Verb

misinherit (third-person singular simple present misinherits, present participle misinheriting, simple past and past participle misinherited)

1. To inherit incorrectly.
   • 1891, Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, Riddles of the Sphinx: A Study in the Philosophy of Evolution, page 104:

     And this incongruence of the inner constitution of man's soul is invincible and universal: his nature is a disordered jumble of misinherited tendencies.

   • 1900, Charles Dickens, Andrew Lang, Christmas stories, page 333:

     He confessed at the last that he had betrayed the trust of the dead, and misinherited a fortune .

   • 1966, Peter A. Fritzell, Landscapes of Anglo-America During Exploration and Early Settlement, page 3:

     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.

   • 2013, Edward T. Duffy, Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism, page 167:

     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).