(Law) The right of a joint tenant, or other person who has a joint interest in an estate, to take the whole estate upon the death of other.
Chance of survivorship, the chance that a person of a given age has of surviving another of a giving age; thus, by the Carlisle tables of mortality the chances of survivorship for two persons, aged 25 and 65, are 89 and 11 respectively, or about 8 to 1 that the elder die first.
... to find in me one who has experienced all manner of disaster at sea and the several kinds of calamity incident to a life on dry land. It would seem a just inference from my Sole Survivorship that I am familiar with railroad wrecks, inundations (though these are hardly dry-land phenomena), pestilences, earthquakes, conflagrations and other forms of what the reporters delight to call "a holocaust." This is not entirely true; ... — The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce