Runt

A runt is one word sitting by itself on the last line of a paragraph. Nothing is broken: the browser filled every line to the measure and this is what was left over. It still reads as a mistake, because a paragraph is a shape as well as a block of words, and a shape that ends in a single short stub tells the eye that something was cut off. Headings, card titles and buttons suffer most, since a two-line heading with one word on the second line is half stub by area.

The vocabulary here is genuinely contested, so it is worth stating the three words precisely. A widow is a short last line of a paragraph pushed onto the top of the next column or page, alone and away from the rest of its paragraph. An orphan is the opposite end: the first line of a paragraph left stranded at the bottom of a column while the rest of it goes over. A runt is a single word alone on the last line of a paragraph, wherever that line happens to fall. Plenty of people say “widow” for what this entry calls a runt, and print tradition on both sides of the Atlantic has swapped the first two more than once; on the web the column-break sense is the one the CSS widows and orphans properties actually implement, which leaves runt as the free and unambiguous word for the lone stub.

The old fix is a non-breaking space between the last two words, which glues them together so they wrap as a unit. It works and it is brittle: at a narrow enough measure the glued pair becomes a two-word runt, and on a heading it can force an uglier break higher up. The modern answers are text balancing with text-wrap: balance for headings, where the browser evens the lines out over a small number of them, and text-wrap: pretty for body copy, which leaves the paragraph’s shape alone but specifically works to avoid a short last line. Nudging the measure, or the copy, still fixes it too.

A runt is not a rag problem, though the two are seen at the same edge. A rag is the texture of the whole right-hand margin over many lines, and it is judged as a shape; a runt is a single event at the end of a block, and it is judged the moment you see it.