Widow

The word is from the composing room, where a page was a physical object and a paragraph could be cut in half by the edge of one. A widow is the tail: the last line of a paragraph, left at the top of the next column with nothing above it and nothing after it. The mnemonic that keeps it straight is grim and effective. A widow has no future, an orphan has no past, so the widow is the line at the top and the orphan is the line at the bottom.

Treat the definitions as contested. Bringhurst puts them this way round, and so do most typesetting manuals, but plenty of style guides and more than one piece of software swap them, and a few use one word for both. The practical move is to describe the case rather than name it when it matters: say “a single word on the last line” or “one line carried to the next column” and nobody has to guess which tradition you learned.

The web mostly lost the print sense along with the page. With no columns and no page breaks, there is nothing for a last line to be stranded at the top of, so the word drifted to the case that does still happen everywhere: a paragraph or heading whose final line holds one lonely word. That is what a designer means by widow in a browser nine times out of ten, and it is worth hearing which sense someone is using before agreeing to fix it.

The fixes go from cheapest to most declarative. Bind the last two words with a no-break space and they wrap together, which is the oldest trick and still the only one that works everywhere. text-wrap: pretty asks the browser to avoid a short last line for you, and text-wrap: balance evens out a heading of a few lines. In paged and multi-column contexts the widows property states the minimum number of lines that may be carried over, usually two. Then there is the fix a typesetter reaches for first, which is to edit the sentence.

What not to do is distort the paragraph to save one word. Tightening the tracking of a whole block, forcing hyphenation, or nudging the measure until this one paragraph behaves are all bigger crimes than the widow. And in text you do not control, user content, translations, anything that reflows, the break moves with the font, the measure, and the reader’s zoom, so ask for the outcome declaratively and let a stray word through when it happens.