estate

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A landed property, usually of considerable size.
2. n. The whole of one's possessions, especially all the property and debts left by one at death.
3. n. Law The nature and extent of an owner's rights with respect to land or other property.
4. n. Chiefly British A housing development.
5. n. The situation or circumstances of one's life: A child's estate gives way to the adult's estate.
6. n. Social position or rank, especially of high order.
7. n. A major social class, such as the clergy, the nobility, or the commons, formerly possessing distinct political rights.
8. n. Archaic Display of wealth or power; pomp.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A fixed or established condition; a special form of existence; state.
2. n. Condition or circumstances of a person or thing; situation; especially, the state of a person as regards external circumstances.
3. n. Rank; quality; status.
4. n. Style of living: usually with a distinctive opithet, high, great, etc., implying pomp or dignity.
5. n. In law: The legal position or status of an owner, considered with respect to his property; ownership, tenancy, or tenure; property in land or other things. When the thing in question is an immovable, such as land, etc., the estate, if a fee, or for a life or lives, is termed real. (See real.) If it is only for a term of years, or relates only to movables, it is termed personal.
6. n. More technically, and with relation only to land, the degree or quantity of interest, considered in respect to the nature of the right, its period of duration, or its relation to the rights of others, which a person has in land. If that interest, in a given case, does not amount to an absolute entire ownership, it is because there is at the same time another interest in the same thing pertaining to other persons. Thus, one man may have the ultimate right of property, another the right of possession, and a third actual possession: each of these interests being qualified or incomplete estates, which, if transferred to and merged in one person, would constitute an absolute estate or fee simple. (See merger.) Such special estates are said to be carved out of the fee. A future estate—that is, one which is not to be enjoyed until a future time—is nevertheless deemed to have a present existence in anticipation, even if it may never take effect, or if it is wholly uncertain who will be its owner; it is, in such case, called a contingent estate. N. Y. Rev. St., III. 2175, § 5.
7. n. Property in general; possessions; particularly, the property left at a man's death: as, at his death his estate was of the value of half a million; the trustees proceeded to realize the estate.
8. n. A piece of landed property; a definite portion of land in the ownership of some one: as, there is more wood on his estate than on mine.
9. n. The body politic; state; commonwealth; public; public interest.
10. n. One of the orders or classes into which the population of some countries is or has been divided, with respect to political rights and powers. In modern times this division has been into nobility, clergy, and people (now, in Great Britain, lords temporal and spiritual and commons), called the three estates. Formerly in France a legislative assembly representing the three estates, called the states-general, was summoned only in emergencies; the last began the revolution of 1789.
11. n. A person of high station or rank; a noble.
12. n. A name humorously given in recent times to the newspaper press, or the body of journalists, as constituting a power in the state distinct from that of the three recognized political orders.
13. To establish in possession; settle.
14. To settle as a possession; bestow; deed.
15. To settle an estate upon; endow with an estate or other property.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. Settled condition or form of existence; state; condition or circumstances of life or of any person; situation.
2. n. Social standing or rank; quality; dignity.
3. n. obsolete A person of high rank.
4. n. A property which a person possesses; a fortune; possessions, esp. property in land; also, property of all kinds which a person leaves to be divided at his death.
5. n. obsolete The state; the general body politic; the common-wealth; the general interest; state affairs.
6. n. The great classes or orders of a community or state (as the clergy, the nobility, and the commonalty of England) or their representatives who administer the government.
7. n. (Law) The degree, quality, nature, and extent of one's interest in, or ownership of, lands, tenements, etc.
8. v. obsolete To establish.
9. v. Archaic Tom settle as a fortune.
10. v. Archaic To endow with an estate.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. everything you own; all of your assets (whether real property or personal property) and liabilities
2. n. a major social class or order of persons regarded collectively as part of the body politic of the country (especially in the United Kingdom) and formerly possessing distinct political rights
3. n. extensive landed property (especially in the country) retained by the owner for his own use