say it: ER-loom
heirloom is a noun meaning "(law) any property that is considered by law or custom as inseparable from an inheritance is inherited with that inheritance". It carries 2 recorded senses.
(law) any property that is considered by law or custom as inseparable from an inheritance is inherited with that inheritance
law
something that has been in a family for generations
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for heirloom come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.