What's the difference between heir and heiress?

Heir


Definition:

  • (n.) One who inherits, or is entitled to succeed to the possession of, any property after the death of its owner; one on whom the law bestows the title or property of another at the death of the latter.
  • (n.) One who receives any endowment from an ancestor or relation; as, the heir of one's reputation or virtues.
  • (v. t.) To inherit; to succeed to.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Antoine Comte, a lawyer for the Schloss heirs, said all the family wanted was the return of the painting.
  • (2) Diana of the sapphire eyes was rated more perfect than Botticelli's Venus and attracted Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune, as soon as she was out in society.
  • (3) They are most commonly described as conduct disordered and hyperactive, appear heir to a variety of deficits in verbal and abstract cognition, and perform more poorly in the academic environment.
  • (4) Another example is the death in 1817 of Princess Charlotte, in childbirth, which led to the scramble of George III's aging sons to marry and beget an heir to the throne.
  • (5) Museveni, who has held power for nearly three decades, has never said he sees his son as his political heir.
  • (6) Throughout his career he has continued to champion Crane, seeing him as the direct heir to Walt Whitman – Whitman being "not just the most American of poets but American poetry proper, our apotropaic champion against European culture" – and slayer of neo-Christian adversaries such as "the clerical TS Eliot" and the old New Critics, who were and are anathema to Bloom, unresting defender of the Romantic tradition.
  • (7) Her parents, Apiruj and Wanthanee Suwadee, were found guilty of violating Article 112 of Thailand’s criminal code which says anyone who “defames, insults or threatens the king, the queen, the heir-apparent or the regent” will be punished with up to 15 years in prison.
  • (8) The anointed heir, Xi Jinping , commanded less attention than former general secretary Jiang Zemin, seated next to current leader Hu Jintao.
  • (9) The two reformists Mr Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi have sought to portray themselves as the true heirs of the Islamic revolution's spiritual leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, but this tactic has since worn thin and Khomeini's successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stepped up his drive to paint Mousavi and Karroubi as western-run heretics.
  • (10) Welsh, but London-based, Jones's real offence to leftwingers - heirs to Nye Bevan - was to be a Blairite, "parachuted" into Blaenau Gwent.
  • (11) Revelations about Charles' power of consent come amid continued concern that the heir to the throne may be overstepping his constitutional role by lobbying ministers directly and through his charities on pet concerns such as traditional architecture and the environment.
  • (12) In the past, they were mostly wealthy British citizens seeking to hold their money outside the UK to avoid income tax and capital gains tax on their earnings, and to pass their wealth to heirs without inheritance tax.
  • (13) The spectacular ascent that saw him grace the cover of Newsweek as Asian of the Year and become the heir apparent of then prime minister Mahathir Mohamad was met with an equally spectacular crash in 1998, when the two fell out and Anwar was imprisoned for six years on corruption and sodomy charges, claims he repeatedly dismissed as politically motivated.
  • (14) The American heirs of a German-Jewish family have launched an unprecedented partnership with German state institutions to try to recover a vast art collection stolen by the Nazis.
  • (15) For seven years, the government has been fighting to prevent the disclosure of the letters – dubbed "black spider memos" because of the heir's handwriting.
  • (16) Tim Loughton, a Sussex MP, said it would be a "nonsense" to stop the heir to the throne talking to ministers as he had always come across as "well briefed and knowledgeable" in their meetings.
  • (17) But both Kennedy and Marks are now dead and Mossa said they had been unable to establish an obvious heir.
  • (18) Carter and the former leaders of Finland, Norway and Ireland were hoping for talks with Kim Jong-il and his son and heir apparent, Kim Jong-un.
  • (19) The gene termed heir-1 was localized to the neuroblastoma consensus deletion at 1p36.2-p36.12.
  • (20) Since Evans’ original request to see Charles’s letters, the government tightened up the Freedom of Information Act to provide an “absolute exemption” on all requests relating to the Queen and the heir to the throne.

Heiress


Definition:

  • (n.) A female heir.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) On the left is the favourite, Spanish-born Hidalgo, 54, protégée of current mayor Bertrand Delanoë and disparagingly referred to as la dauphine (the heiress).
  • (2) However, the most spectacular fundraiser was not the auction room but a wedding, when the ninth duke married the American railroad heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, securing a gigantic dowry, a fortune in shares and an annual allowance.
  • (3) Around the same time, the motor racing heiress Tamara Ecclestone totted up a champagne bill of £30,000 in one evening.
  • (4) Trump’s eldest daughter, heiress-apparent to her father’s real estate empire, said she had worked with him for more than a decade and seen him hire people from “all walks of life”.
  • (5) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marjorie Merriweather Post, the cereal heiress who had Mar-a-Lago built in 1927.
  • (6) Alan M Dershowitz, who has represented heiress Patty Hearst and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, is asking to represent the 81-year-old director of Chinatown and The Pianist in the Los Angeles county superior court.
  • (7) Sobchak was once dubbed the Paris Hilton of Russia because of her similarity to the American hotel heiress.
  • (8) In 2010 Mediapart, which is run by veteran French newspaper and agency journalists, broke the story of an alleged party funding scandal around Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party and the L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.
  • (9) France's richest woman, L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, and her daughter have called a truce in the three-year family feud that sparked a political crisis.
  • (10) When Carla Bruni-Sarkozy – a millionaire heiress who once made over £4m a year as a supermodel – became France's first lady, commentators whispered that she might be attacked as a kind of modern-day Marie Antoinette.
  • (11) Shortly afterwards, the heiress's former bookkeeper claimed Bettencourt had made illegal cash donations to Sarkozy's 2007 presidential election campaign, an allegation vehemently denied by the French leader and his entourage.
  • (12) While some are already privately owned, such as Skorpios by the Onassis shipping heiress Athina Onassis, the state owns islands such as Fleves, which is near the coastal resort area of Vouliagmeni, and a cluster of three islands near Corfu.
  • (13) The mansion was built by cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in 1927, at a cost of $7m.
  • (14) Another example explains the structure the bank proposed for a British client: “A new Liberian Company that we shall open for ESD reasons, as the client is Greek and UK resident … transfer all assets from the named accounts to the Corp. account” it notes for a retail heiress with £8m.
  • (15) Suchlike scribbling formed a seedbed for the art Twombly developed after he returned to Italy in 1957 and married an heiress.
  • (16) An export bar was placed on the Van Dyck last November , temporarily halting its sale to the Los Angeles-based financier James Stunt, husband of the heiress Tamara Ecclestone.
  • (17) As the 29-year-old heiress to one of the wealthiest real-estate dynasties in south-east Asia, IGB of Malaysia, she’s part of a fast-growing group in Britain: the big-money investor getting into independent eateries.
  • (18) 2 Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playlist Paris Hilton is the target; her dog kills itself and the heiress's supposed vacuity is ridiculed in catchy songs.
  • (19) HMRC does not publish names, but the roll call of declared non-doms includes the Tetra Pak heiress Sigrid Rausing, the financier Ben Goldsmith, the Dragons’ Den entrepreneur James Caan, and the newspaper owner Viscount Rothermere, who inherited his French nationality, along with the Daily Mail newspaper, from his father.
  • (20) Sarkozy, who was under investigation for allegedly accepting cash from the L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, 90, was told there was no case to answer and he would not be sent for trial.