The Collaborative International Dictionary
Survivorship \Sur*viv"or*ship\, n. 1. The state of being a survivor.
1. (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.
--Blackstone.
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.
Wiktionary
n. 1 The state of being a survivor. 2 (context legal English) A right whereby a person becomes entitled to property by reason of his having survived another person who had an interest in it. It is one of the elements of a tenancy.
WordNet
Usage examples of "survivorship".
Had I understood more about survivorship, I would have recognized that my comeback attempt was bound to be fraught with psychological problems.
There must be strong survivorship among the lower orders: fish, insects, annelids.
For me, it was the death of an infant sister the year I was born, an event that shaped not only my role in the family drama but also the images of death and survivorship that would eventually emerge in my poetry, fiction and nonfiction.
So on the scale of survivorship that was his way of measuring worth, his kind ranked higher.
Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of New York City, civilization largely interferes with the laws of evolution, by survivorship and by encouraging the waste which arises from it.