Other forms: heirlooms
An heirloom is an old family thing that gets handed down instead of sold — your grandmother's ring, a clock that has stood in four different houses, the silver nobody dares eat off. What it is worth is who owned it before you.
The h is silent, so it sounds like air and takes an: an heirloom, never a heirloom. It lives beside family — a family heirloom is the ordinary phrase — and it wants an object, so a recipe or a story is passed down rather than handed on as an heirloom. Gardeners have borrowed the word as well: an heirloom tomato is an old variety kept alive by people saving their own seed, in the years when the shops sold nothing but the new ones.
1nounpieceA valuable object passed down through the generations of a family.~46%
“The watch is a family heirloom and it still keeps time.”
synonyms: keepsake
2nounheirloomAn old variety of plant kept going by saving and replanting its seed.~54%
“He grows heirloom beans from seed his father saved.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 75 sentences found in the wild and placed 65 of them on a sense (10 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
HEIRloom → the AIR
Your grandmother's gold watch hangs in mid-air over the open box, turning slowly — no hand, no chain, the air itself is holding it up. She reaches into the air, takes the watch down, and closes your fingers round it. The air has held it there since her own grandmother's day.
hooks ontoair
Middle English heirlome, literally a tool passed to your heirs — and the loom in it is not the weaving frame. Loom was the old English word for any tool or implement at all, so an heirloom was the implement that went to the heir. It pushed out the older native word for the same thing, fæderġestrēon.
Middle English
heirlome — heirloom
English, today
heirloom
Middle English heirlome (“heirloom”) literally “a tool or article passed to one's heirs”. by surface analysis, en + heir + loom. Displaced native fæderġestrēon.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA