From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishhereditaryhe‧red‧i‧ta‧ry /həˈredətəri $ -teri/ ●○○ adjective 1 HBMa quality or illness that is hereditary is passed from a parent to a child before the child is born → genetic2 British EnglishSSFCLASS IN SOCIETY a hereditary position, rank, or title can be passed from an older to a younger person in the same family, usually when the older one dies → inherit a hereditary peer
Examples from the Corpus
hereditary• Some forms of deafness are hereditary.• Man-eating, he claimed, was not hereditary.• Where evidence is available, some kind of hereditary comital succession seems always to have been normal.• It was rather a kind of oligarchy, with a strong hereditary element in its composition.• This hereditary factor means that there is often a connection between the physical appearance of an individual and it s temperament.• It found itself unable to prevent the pomeshchiks from buying and selling their estates and rapidly establishing defacto hereditary rights of ownership.• The counts are hereditary rulers whose families have long and famous histories.• However, the period immediately after the Conquest saw short-lived hereditary surnames beginning to emerge.• The system of reversion could also be used, as we have seen, to establish something near to defacto hereditary tenure. 