Orphan

An orphan is a beginning with nothing after it: the first line of a paragraph sits at the bottom of a column, and the rest of the paragraph is on the next one. The mnemonic is the same one that sorts out its sibling. An orphan has no past, a widow has no future, so the orphan is the line at the bottom and the widow is the line at the top.

Treat the definitions as contested. Bringhurst and most typesetting manuals use them this way round, several style guides and a few applications swap them, and some writers use one word for both cases. When it matters, describe the case instead of naming it: “one line left at the bottom of the column” cannot be misread, and neither can “one word on the last line”.

The worst orphan is not a line of body text at all, it is a heading. A heading stranded at the foot of a column promises something that is not there, and the reader has to turn the page to find out what it was introducing. That case is worth a rule of its own rather than a case by case fix.

CSS states the whole family declaratively, and it only means anything where there are fragments to break between: paged media, print stylesheets, and multi-column layout. orphans sets the minimum number of lines a paragraph may leave behind at the bottom of a fragment, widows the minimum it may carry to the top of the next, and two is the usual answer for both. break-inside: avoid keeps a whole block together, which is right for a short paragraph, a figure, or a table row. break-after: avoid on a heading ties it to whatever follows, and it is the one declaration that fixes the heading case for good.

On a screen the geometry moves under your feet, since the reader’s window, font size, and zoom all change where a column ends. So ask for the outcome rather than hand fixing the break. Hand tuned copy that behaves in one viewport is doing nothing at all in the next, and a paragraph edited to save a line often reads worse than the orphan it was avoiding.