Other forms: heritages
Heritage is everything valuable the past has handed to the people alive now: buildings, languages, songs, recipes, landscapes. A cathedral kept standing at public expense, a fishing village left as it was, a grandmother's recipes copied out by hand.
The common pairings are cultural heritage, national heritage and World Heritage Site — the UNESCO label for places judged to matter to everyone. As an adjective it means preserved and old-fashioned on purpose: a heritage railway, heritage tomatoes, heritage paint colours. Heritage also covers where a person comes from: of Polish heritage, of mixed heritage. Do not confuse it with inheritance. An inheritance is money and property left to one named person; heritage is shared, cultural, and cannot be spent. It takes no plural.
1nounheritageThe buildings, traditions and culture passed down from earlier generations and thought worth keeping.
“The town's industrial heritage is written all over its brick warehouses.”
2nounancestryThe family or national background a person is born into.
“She writes about growing up in London with a Nigerian heritage.”
synonyms: ancestry, background
3adjectivepreservedPreserved from an earlier time, or made in the old way.
“They restored the carriages and now run a heritage line along the coast.”
heritage is something inherited.
Heritage came through Old French heritage from Latin hērēs, an heir. Strip it back and heritage is the heir's share — what is left to whoever comes next. English kept the whole family from that one Latin word: heir, inherit, heritage. Only the scale changed, because an heir inherits from a person, while a nation inherits from its own past.
Latin
hērēs
Old French
eritage,heritage
Middle English
heritage
English, today
heritage
From Middle English heritage, from Old French eritage,heritage (modern French héritage), ultimately derived (through suffixation) from Latin hērēs. by surface analysis, herit + -age.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA