Patrimony is the property that comes down to you after your father dies — land, money, a house, a family business — especially when those same things came to him from his father, and to that man from his father before that. The old picture is a line of fathers handing the family goods forward. It is not simply “anything you get when someone dies.” Inheritance can come from an aunt, a mother, or anyone who writes you into a will. Patrimony, in the strict old sense, is the father’s-line store: what the family kept, father to child.

It is a formal, slightly old-fashioned word. You meet it in law, history, and careful writing more than in everyday talk. A student is more likely to say “what my grandfather left us” or “the family property.” Though actually, real families were never only fathers: mothers’ kin left land and gold too. The word grew up in a world that counted the father’s side first, so the tidy dictionary story is tidier than life.

People also stretch it. A country may speak of its cultural patrimony — old buildings, language, crafts — as if the whole nation had received a family gift from the past. Same picture, bigger than a farm.