orphan

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

• n. A child whose parents are dead.
• n. A child who has been deprived of parental care and has not been adopted.
• n. A young animal without a mother.
• n. One that lacks support, supervision, or care: A lack of corporate interest has made the subsidiary an orphan.
• n. An orphan technology or product.
• n. A line of type beginning a new paragraph at the bottom of a column or page.
• n. A short line of type at the bottom of a paragraph, column, or page; a widow.
• adj. Deprived of parents.
• adj. Intended for orphans: an orphan home.
• adj. Lacking support, supervision, or care.
• adj. Not developed or marketed, especially on account of being commercially unprofitable: "an aggregation of every orphan technology at the Pentagon, stuff that's been around for years that nobody would buy” ( Harper's).
• transitive v. To deprive (a child or young animal) of a parent or parents.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

• n. A person, especially a minor, both or (rarely) one of whose parents have died.
• n. A young animal with no mother.
• n. Anything that is unsupported, as by its source, provider or caretaker, by reason of the supporter's demise or decision to abandon.
• n. A single line of type, beginning a paragraph, at the bottom of a column or page.
• n. Any unreferenced object.
• adj. Deprived of parents (also orphaned).
• adj. Remaining after the removal of some form of support.
• v. To deprive of parents (used almost exclusively in the passive)
• v. (computing) To make unavailable, as by unlinking the last remaining pointer to.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

• n. A child bereaved of both father and mother; sometimes, also, a child who has but one parent living.
• adj. Bereaved of parents, or (sometimes) of one parent.
• transitive v. To cause to become an orphan; to deprive of parents.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

• Bereft of parents; fatherless, motherless, or without either father or mother; bereaved: said of a child or a young and dependent person.
• Not under control or protection analogous to that of a parent; unprotected; unassisted.
• Of or belonging to a child bereft of either parent or of both parents.
• n. A child bereaved of one parent or of both parents, generally the latter.
• To reduce to the state of being an orphan; bereave of parents.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• n. someone or something who lacks support or care or supervision
• n. a young animal without a mother
• n. the first line of a paragraph that is set as the last line of a page or column
• n. a child who has lost both parents
• v. deprive of parents