heiress

Any educated reader can be assumed to interpret 'heiress' as 'heiress to a fortune' in this context.

So you can be a millionaire heir / heiress, independently wealthy and still be eligible for it.

Titanic: pretty heiress enjoys shipboard romance with handsome peasant until angry fiance catches her.

German heiress Marlene Engelhorn [1] faced the same question when trying to give away her comparably small inheritance of 25 million euros.

He was prolific in Houston's social business scene for decades and married the Brown heiress, who was similarly known (along with her father).

He married an heiress to the Darty fortune (Darty is a chain of electronic stores in France similar to Circuit City in the US).

I don't think marrying a billionaire heiress is the best way to get into Google.

In the years when Paris Hilton was shooting reality shows, she was working a hell of a lot harder than a society heiress needs to.

If Paris Hilton was not a wealthy heiress, I think it's safe to say her career choices would be significantly more constrained.

RIP you Old Bitch =D ---- The heiress affliction, e.g.

Rishi Sunak's wife is a better example: the one in the couple with the money is the Indian heiress not the British former hedge fund manager!

But isn't the drama between the billionaire heiress and her starving-artist lover more interesting than the lawyer girlfriend deciding whether she wants to marry her below-average-salary boyfriend?

"Heiress" without any qualifiers means more or less the same thing, so it's natural to be surprised by the word choice.

For example: read "Confessions of a Heiress" by Paris Hilton.

It was first popularized in modern canon by Paris Hilton, who played the “dumb blonde heiress” stereotype so smoothly that everyone assumed she really was as stupid as she seemed.

She was a woman at Harvard in the middle of 20th century, it's already obvious that she was rich, which once again supports my point that the word "heiress" provides virtually no new information here.