parentless

English

Etymology

From parent +‎ -less.

Adjective

parentless (not comparable)

1. Having no (living) parent.
   • 1973, Michael Gordon, The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective:

     Firstly, then, who were these parentless children who seem to have been present in a sizeable proportion of households...

   • 2004, Michael Kay, XSLT 2.0 Programmer's Reference:

     Two consequences of parentless elements complicate the rules.

   • 2011, Philip Reeve, Scrivener's Moon, Scholastic, →ISBN, page 158:

     No, if you wanted to free yourself of feelings you didn't want to be an Engineer. Growing up parentless on Ditch Street, though; that would really do the trick.

2. (computing) Having no parent in a data structure.
   • 2012, Michael Lawrence, John Verzani, Programming Graphical User Interfaces in R, page 19:

     The top-level window is parentless and forms the root of the hierarchy.

Coordinate terms

• fatherless
• motherless

Derived terms

• parentlessness

Translations

having no parent

• Georgian: უმშობლო (umšoblo)
• German: elternlos (de)
• Ido: senpatra
• Norwegian:

  Bokmål: foreldreløs, foreldrelaus

  Nynorsk: foreldrelaus

• Sanskrit: अनाथ (sa) (anātha)
• Swedish: förälralös

See also

• half orphan
• orphan