Compositors and proofreaders make it their business to do away with widows and orphans, but if they cop to this among non-publishing people they’ll probably be misunderstood.

In typography, a widow is a single line of a paragraph that appears at the top of a page. An orphan is the single line of a paragraph that appears at the bottom of a page. A surprising number of editors, writers, and other publishing pros get the gist but can’t keep the two straight. My mnemonic for this is “The widow goes on alone; the orphan is left behind.”

If you’d like a crash course on widows and orphans, Wikipedia can help. Please follow Wiki’s caution at the top of the page and don’t confuse widows and orphans with the Masonic Widows and Orphans Home. It’s in Louisville, Kentucky, and though it was originally built for the widows and orphans of Master Masons, it is now open to all senior citizens. Learn something new every day . . .

Publishers and publications may have their own specs for “widow” and “orphan’; for instance, a single full line is permissible but a short one of two or three words is not. A trade publisher I’ve been proofreading for for many years wants at least two lines on either side of a section break and at least five lines at the end of a chapter. Two/five is now so deeply embedded in my head that when a print ms. doesn’t comply it looks sloppy to me. Sane people do not worry about widows and orphans in their mss.

Microsoft Word and other word-processing apps generally have widow/orphan control settings. Here’s what Word 2016’s version looks like on Kore, my Win10 laptop:

If you’ve got one of the ribbon versions of Word, it’s on the Home ribbon. Click the little arrow in the lower-right corner of the Paragraph block, then click the Line and Page Breaks tab. Voilà!

I was about to say that with ebooks one doesn’t have to worry about widows and orphans because text flows differently depending on what device it’s being read on, but then I recalled seeing some pretty bizarre chapter breaks in some ebooks so I Googled responsive + design + ebook and learned that there is a good deal more to this than I thought — that, for instance, some ebooks are laid out page by page like print books. For more about that, check out “Responsive Ebook Design: A Primer.”

Incidentally, in the publishing world an orphan can also be a book accepted for publication whose acquiring editor moved to another house before the book was launched. Generally the author’s contract is with the publisher, so the book doesn’t get to go too. This can be bad news for book and author because the acquiring editor is usually the book’s biggest champion, the one who fights with designers, artists, marketing people, and others on the book’s behalf. If the departing editor’s replacement is less than enthusiastic, the book may suffer.

I just learned from the Chicago Manual of Style that works whose publishers have gone out of business are also called orphans. This can be a PITA if you’re trying to track down a copyright owner for permission to reprint or quote extensively from a work.