widowsorphans

Widowsorphans is a term used in typography to describe the occurrence of a paragraph being split across page or column boundaries in a way that creates an isolated line. The term combines two related problems, widows and orphans, which are concerns about line breaks that disrupt reading rhythm. A widow is the final line of a paragraph that appears alone at the top of a page or column; an orphan is the first line of a paragraph that appears alone at the bottom of a page or column. Both disrupt the visual flow and can hinder readability and aesthetics, particularly in dense layouts such as magazines or books.

Causes include automated pagination, column balancing, long or short paragraphs, or forced breaks. They are more likely in tightly set text, multi‑column layouts, or when content is edited or revised after initial pagination.

Prevention and management involve using widow/orphan control features in word processors and layout software, such as keeping lines together with keep-with-next settings, adjusting hyphenation, leading, margins, and paragraph spacing. In professional typesetting systems like TeX or LaTeX, penalties such as widowpenalty and clubpenalty discourage breaks that would create widows or orphans, and manual adjustments may be employed for critical passages.

Relevance: Controlling widows and orphans is a common quality criterion in publishing and digital typography. While most production workflows aim to minimize them, some designs may tolerate or even emphasize such breaks for stylistic reasons.