inhere

English

WOTD – 11 July 2011

Alternative forms

• inhære (archaic)

Etymology

From Latin inhaerēre (“stick in, stick to, inhere to”), from in (“in”) + haereō (“stick”); see hesitate. Compare adhere, cohere.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ɪnˈhɪə/
• Rhymes: -ɪə(ɹ)

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Verb

inhere (third-person singular simple present inheres, present participle inhering, simple past and past participle inhered)

1. (uncommon) To be inherent; to be an essential or intrinsic part of; to be fixed or permanently incorporated with something.
   • 1932, T. S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger”, in Essays on Elizabethan Drama, USA: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc., published 1960, page 151:

     He [Massinger] inherits the traditions of conduct, female chastity, hymeneal sanctity, the fashion of honour, without either criticizing or informing them from his own experience. In the earlier drama these conventions are merely a framework, or an alloy necessary for working the metal; the metal itself consisted of unique emotions resulting inevitably from the circumstances, resulting or inhering as inevitably as the properties of a chemical compound.

   • 2001, Will Self, Feeding Frenzy:

     We had already been claimed by the split infinitives of Star Trek, were already preparing to boldly go into a world where ethics, so far from inhering in the very structure of the cosmos, was a matter of personal taste […] .

   • 2008, Zev Handel, “What is Sino-Tibetan? Snapshot of a Field and a Language Family in Flux”, in Language and Linguistics Compass, volume 2, number 3, →DOI, pages 422-441:

     […] such developments are attributable in part to the tendencies for parallel 'drift' that inhere in genetically related languages because of the perseverance of typological similarities – an idea originally put forward by Sapir.

   • 5 January 2009, John Kraemer, Larry Gostin, The Guardian:

     Sovereignty should inhere in the people and not the government, so governments forfeit sovereignty when they commit crimes against humanity.

Derived terms

• coinhere

Related terms

• adhere
• cohere
• inherent
• inherence
• inherency

Translations

To be inherent; to be an essential or intrinsic part of; to be fixed or permanently incorporated with something

Arabic: please add this translation if you can Armenian: հատուկ լինել (hatuk linel), պատկանել (hy) (patkanel) Bulgarian: принадлежа (bg) (prinadleža) Chinese: Mandarin: 固有 (zh) (gùyǒu), 与生俱来 (zh) (yǔshēngjùlái) Czech: please add this translation if you can Dutch: inhouden (nl), een inherent deel van uitmaken Finnish: kuulua (olennaisena osana) French: être inhérent à German: innewohnen (de), anhaften (de), enthalten sein, zu etwas / jmdn. gehören Hindi: please add this translation if you can Ido: inherar (io) Italian: essere inerente, connesso (a); appartenere (a); essere proprio (di ); essere intrinseco (a) Japanese: please add this translation if you can Korean: please add this translation if you can Occitan: inerir Portuguese: inerir Romanian: fi inerent Russian: принадлежа́ть (ru) (prinadležátʹ), явля́ться частью (javljátʹsja častʹju) Spanish: ser inherente Vietnamese: please add this translation if you can

Further reading

• “inhere”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “inhere”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.

Anagrams

• Henrie, herein, rheine