HEIRESS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does heiress mean? 

• HEIRESS (noun)
  The noun HEIRESS has 1 sense:

1. a female heir

  Familiarity information: HEIRESS used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• HEIRESS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A female heir

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

heiress; inheritress; inheritrix

Hypernyms ("heiress" is a kind of...):

heir; heritor; inheritor (a person who is entitled by law or by the terms of a will to inherit the estate of another)

 Context examples 

She has only one daughter, the heiress of Rosings, and of very extensive property.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

He wrote again a few weeks since, to intimate that the heiress was lost, and asking if we knew anything of her.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Her intimacy there had made him seriously determine on her being handsomely legacied hereafter; and to speak of her therefore as the almost acknowledged future heiress of Fullerton naturally followed.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

Then you'd dash out as an heiress, scorn everyone who has slighted you, go abroad, and come home my Lady Something in a blaze of splendor and elegance.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

Great had been the rejoicing amid the Romsey nuns when the Lady Maude Loring had craved admission into their order—for was she not sole child and heiress of the old knight, with farms and fiefs which she could bring to the great nunnery?

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Does it not strike you as a little singular that this McCarthy, who appears to have had little of his own, and to have been under such obligations to Turner, should still talk of marrying his son to Turner’s daughter, who is, presumably, heiress to the estate, and that in such a very cocksure manner, as if it were merely a case of a proposal and all else would follow?

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He only wanted to aggrandise and enrich himself; and if Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield, the heiress of thirty thousand pounds, were not quite so easily obtained as he had fancied, he would soon try for Miss Somebody else with twenty, or with ten.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

Yes, you, rich—quite an heiress.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

As it is an open secret that the Duke of Balmoral has been compelled to sell his pictures within the last few years, and as Lord St. Simon has no property of his own save the small estate of Birchmoor, it is obvious that the Californian heiress is not the only gainer by an alliance which will enable her to make the easy and common transition from a Republican lady to a British peeress.’

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)