Widows and orphans

In typesetting, widows and orphans are single lines of text from a paragraph that dangle at either the beginning or end of a block of text, or form a very short final line at the end of a paragraph. When split across pages, they occur at either the head or foot of a page (or column), unaccompanied by additional lines from the same paragraph. The pairing of the two terms with their definitions has no consistent standard across the industry; some sources use the opposite meanings as others.

Additionally, runts (which varying sources also call widows or orphans) are cases where a paragraph anywhere on a page ends with a very short final line. They give an impression of excessive empty space between that and the following paragraph.