parentless
Having no (living) parent.
Adjective
- Having no (living) parent.
- Firstly, then, who were these parentless children who seem to have been present in a sizeable proportion of households... - 1973, Michael Gordon, The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective:
- 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. - 2011, Philip Reeve, Scrivener's Moon, Scholastic, →ISBN,...
- Having no parent in a data structure.
- The top-level window is parentless and forms the root of the hierarchy. - 2012, Michael Lawrence, John Verzani, Programming Graphical User Interfaces in R, page 19:
- Two consequences of parentless elements complicate the rules. - 2004, Michael Kay, XSLT 2.0 Programmer's Reference:
Origin
Etymology tree English parent Proto-Indo-European *lewh₁- Proto-Indo-European *lewHs-der. Proto-Germanic *leusaną Proto-Germanic *lausaz Proto-Germanic *-lausaz Proto-West Germanic *-laus Old English -lēas Middle English -les English -less English parentless From parent + -less.