the.com/heirloom tomato

means A tomato grown from open-pollinated seeds saved and passed down over generations, prized for flavor and lineage rather than uniform looks or shelf life.

from The 'heirloom' half comes straight from inheritance — Middle English 'heir' plus 'loom,' an old word for tool or implement, originally meaning a valuable household object handed down through a family. By the 20th century gardeners borrowed that sense of passed-down treasure for seeds kept and resown year after year, long before 'tomato' itself entered English from Spanish 'tomate,' which traces back to the Nahuatl 'tomatl.' So the phrase literally means a tomato whose seeds are a family heirloom — the name is sentimental, not botanical.