Etymology

From parent +‎ -lessCategory:English terms suffixed with -less#PARENTLESS.

Adjective

parentless (not comparable)Category:English lemmas#PARENTLESSCategory:English adjectives#PARENTLESSCategory:English uncomparable adjectives#PARENTLESSCategory:English entries with incorrect language header#PARENTLESSCategory:Pages with entries#PARENTLESSCategory:Pages with 1 entry#PARENTLESS

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...

     Category:English terms with quotations#PARENTLESS

   • 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.

     Category:English terms with quotations#PARENTLESS

2. (computingCategory:en:Computing#PARENTLESS) 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.

     Category:English terms with quotations#PARENTLESS

     Category:Quotation templates to be cleaned
   • 2004, Michael Kay, XSLT 2.0 Programmer's Reference:

     Two consequences of parentless elements complicate the rules.

     Category:English terms with quotations#PARENTLESS

     Category:Quotation templates to be cleaned

See also

• half orphan
• orphan