legacy

noun

1. Money or property bequeathed to someone in a will.
2. Something inherited from a predecessor or the past.

   “John Muir left as his legacy an enduring spirit of respect for the environment.”

   “During the first year or so of British Railways, some of the simpler and more obvious inter-regional transfers of outlying sections were effected, such as those of the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway from the London Midland Region to the Eastern Region; the South Wales lines of the former L.M.S.R. to the Western Region; the Carlisle-Silloth branch (an L.N.E.R. legacy of a North British "border raid") to the London Midland, and so on.”

   “And judging by how well the progressive and youth-favoured party did, many observers suspect this latest round of legal charges are a response to Future Forward's commitment to undo the legacy of military rule and undertake democratic reforms.”

   “As the country reckons with how to prevent more children from being killed at school, the legacies of the Parkland victims live on.”

3. The descendant of an alumnus, given preference in academic admissions.

   “Because she was a legacy, her mother's sorority rushed her.”

adj

1. (especially, not-comparable)Left over from the past; old and no longer current.

   “They have no idea what occurs in the network or its topology, and all of the services remain dependent on it — a very legacy approach to creating services in the optical network.”

   “However, pre-relational DBMS are legacy.”

   “Finally, the organisation ends up with an expensive ERP of which it uses only part because of divergent evolutionary directions and a set of new systems fast becoming legacy.”

   “There was talk in the past that ERP systems were legacy, lacked the agility and flexibility, and did not support interoperability.”

   “Because most of these HALs are legacy and only used on aging or outdated hardware, chances are that you do not have any in your lab and must be creative in procuring one from an active user.”

2. (not-comparable, postpositional, sometimes)Belonging to a class of boardgame where permanent changes are made to game elements such as the board, cards and rules over multiple play sessions.

   “Risk Legacy, in 2011, was the first game to give visibility to the idea of progressive and irreversible discovery in the board gaming hobby, 2 and it did so by applying it to the well-known game Risk.”

   “Over the course of the years that Daviau worked on Seafall, the first legacy game that was not based on a previously existing product, the mechanic became one of the hotter things in game design”

   “Pandemic Legacy can take weeks or even months to play given different groups' play styles.”

   “The social deception game Blood on the Clocktower has recently used this mechanic to significant effect to create a legacy version of Mafia.”