# orphan

Pronunciation: US say "OR-fuhn" /ˈɔɹfən/; UK say "AW-fuhn" /ˈɔːfən/

## Noun

1. A child whose parents have died or, less often, have permanently abandoned them; sometimes a child who has lost one parent.
   - Simple: A child whose parents are dead or have left them for good.
   - _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._
4. Anything left without support from its source, provider, or caretaker because that supporter has ended or has abandoned it.
   - Simple: Something that no one supports or looks after anymore, because the people behind it died or gave it up.
   - _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._
5. A young animal left without its mother.
   - Simple: A baby animal that has no 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._
7. Any object, such as a piece of data or a file, to which no reference remains.
   - Simple: A piece of data or a file in a computer that nothing points to anymore.
   - _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._
8. A single line that begins a paragraph but sits alone at the bottom of a column or page.
   - Simple: The first line of a paragraph left alone at the bottom of a page or column.
   - _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._

## Adjective

2. Deprived of one's parents.
   - Simple: Left without a mother and father.
   - _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._
6. Still existing after some form of support has been taken away.
   - Simple: Still there after the support behind it 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._

## Verb

3. To deprive a person or an animal of parents; used almost always in the passive.
   - Simple: To leave a person or animal with no parents.
   - _Orphaned as an infant, he never knew either of his parents._
   - _Poachers who kill elephants also orphan the calves that depend on them._
9. To make an object unreachable, for example by removing the last remaining pointer or reference to it.
   - Simple: To leave a file or piece of data that nothing can reach, often by deleting the last link 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._

## 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").

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/orphan (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).