orphan
Pluralorphans
Verborphans, orphaning, orphaned
Pluralorphans
Formsorphans, orphaning, orphaned
- 1A child whose parents have died or, less often, have permanently abandoned them; sometimes a child who has lost one parent.
Left an orphan at seven, he was raised by his grandparents on a farm.
The war left thousands of orphans in need of food and shelter.
UsageOften left an orphan at a certain age; the verb form is orphaned: orphaned at seven.
- 2Deprived of one's parents.
The novel follows an orphan girl who is sent to work in a London mill.
Volunteers bottle-fed the orphan calves until they could graze.
UsageUsually before a noun: an orphan girl; after a verb, say orphaned: the girl was orphaned.
Similarparentless
- 3To deprive a person or an animal of parents; used almost always in the passive.
Orphaned as an infant, he never knew either of his parents.
Poachers who kill elephants also orphan the calves that depend on them.
UsageUsually passive, saying when or how: orphaned at seven, orphaned as an infant, orphaned by war.
- 4Anything left without support from its source, provider, or caretaker because that supporter has ended or has abandoned it.
Once the publisher folded, the series was an orphan, with no one to print or promote it.
After the manufacturer closed, its products became orphans with no technical support or spare parts.
- 5A young animal left without its mother.
Rangers found the elephant calf wandering alone and brought the orphan to a rescue center.
A ewe will often reject an orphan unless it smells like her own lamb.
- 6Still existing after some form of support has been taken away.
When the studio pulled its funding, the documentary became an orphan film that no distributor would touch.
Regulators worry about orphan wells left unsealed after their operators went bankrupt.
UsageUsually before a noun: an orphan film, orphan wells.
Similarabandoned
- 7Any object, such as a piece of data or a file, to which no reference remains.
In a language without garbage collection, each orphan is memory the program can never free.
The maintenance script flags orphans in the wiki so editors can link to them from somewhere.
Note
How much an orphan matters depends on the language. Where memory is managed by hand, it is memory the program can never free; in a language with garbage collection, such as Java, the collector reclaims its memory, though it may still hold resources such as open files, and keeping orphans few can still make a program run faster.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 5 facts
- The consequences of unreachable allocated memory depend on whether memory management is manual or automatic. oracle.com
- With manual memory management, losing all pointers to an allocated block prevents the program from freeing it. valgrind.org
- Java has garbage collection that reclaims unreachable heap objects. docs.oracle.com
- Garbage collection can reclaim unreachable heap memory, but it does not automatically release every resource an object holds, such as a file handle. docs.oracle.com
- Producing fewer garbage objects can improve program performance. go.dev
Less common meanings
- 8A single line that begins a paragraph but sits alone at the bottom of a column or page.
The designer added a page break above the orphan, so the line moved to the next page with the rest of its paragraph.
Most layout software can be set to prevent widows and orphans automatically.
UsageUsually paired: widows and orphans.
Oppositewidow
Note
Typesetters pair it with the widow, the last line of a paragraph stranded at the top of the next page or column, and careful layout avoids both. The names are not used consistently: some writers swap them, and some call any stray line a widow. One way to keep them straight is that the orphan is cut off from what follows, the widow from what came before.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 3 facts
- A widow is a paragraph's last line isolated at the top of the following page or column. w3.org
- Some sources reverse the names widow and orphan. en.wikipedia.org
- Some writers use widow for any short or isolated line. yalebooks.yale.edu
- 9To make an object unreachable, for example by removing the last remaining pointer or reference to it.
Reassigning the only pointer to a new node orphans the old one, and the garbage collector reclaims it.
Deleting the head of the linked list without saving its next pointer will orphan every node after it.
Note
Orphaning cuts a thing off from access: nothing leads to it anymore, though an object in memory may then be reclaimed automatically. Beyond objects in memory, the verb covers files and pages, such as an icon no image tag points to or pages dropped from a site's category tree, and what is left behind is an orphan.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 4 facts
- Removing access does not guarantee continued existence: losing the last reference can trigger immediate reclamation, as in CPython. docs.python.org
- Removing an image tag can orphan the icon it referenced. en.wiktionary.org
- Removing categories can orphan pages from a site's category tree. en.wiktionary.org
- An unreferenced object is called an orphan. en.wiktionary.org
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origin
Proto-Indo-European *h₃órbʰos gave Ancient Greek orphanós ("without parents, fatherless"), which passed into Late Latin as orphanus and then into Late Middle English. Cognates include Latin orbus ("orphaned"), Sanskrit árbha, Old English ierfa ("heir"), and Old High German erbi or arbi (German Erbe, "inheritance").