What the Heck are Widows and Orphans in Typography?
formatting basics
Essentials of a quality book layout
Widows and orphans are terms that refer to a type of improper text formatting in print—specifically, paragraphs or lines of text that break in non-ideal places. Seeing them inside a print book is an indicator of non-professional formatting.
There's no consensus on which term applies to which type of break, so they are often used interchangeably. For our purposes, we’ll say a widow is when the last line of a paragraph falls by itself at the top of a new page. An orphan is when the last word of a paragraph falls on a line by itself, as in the example below.
Above is an example of an orphan, sometimes called a runt
There are no hard and fast rules (that would be too easy!) as to the minimum number of words or characters that should fall on the last line of a paragraph. For example, two extremely short words can look worse than a single long word. It depends on the paragraph as a whole, as well as the overall width of the text on the page.
Some people say it's okay to have the first line of a paragraph fall by itself at the bottom of a page, and others disagree and say there must be at least two lines together.
A book interior is such a complex piece of formatting that it's nearly impossible not to make a few subjective decisions or exceptions to the "rules." But these are things that professional book formatters watch out for and adjust. They cause extra white space and hinder the flow of reading. The one hard and fast rule is that the last line of a paragraph falling by itself at the top of a new page is never ever okay.
Professional formatting software like InDesign makes it incredibly easy to fix widows and orphans, which is why seeing them in a book is an instant cue that it may have been formatted in Microsoft Word, or by a lower quality book design service that is cranking out books as quickly as possible.
I recently saw a picture of a book interior on a professional book formatting website, and the first thing I noticed was an orphan—a glaringly-obvious tiny 4-letter word all by itself on the last line of a paragraph.
These things may not seem like they matter much they add up, and can have a huge impact on the reader's experience and the perceived quality of your book.
Checking samples of a book formatter's work for instances of widows and orphans can be a great way to see what level of service they'll provide. And if you do use a designer who leaves widows and orphans, now you know how (and why) to ask for them to be fixed.
Check out my previous blog article for more tips on finding a quality book designer.