No. 09 There’s an orphan.

An orphan is one word stuck alone on the last line of a paragraph.

It looks sloppy, wastes a line & trips up your eye.

Nudge the width until every word has company.

Widows & orphans are printers’ terms for lonely lines cut off from their paragraph.

Robert Bringhurst’s rule of thumb: orphans have no past, widows have no future.

But definitions flip from book to book. Many designers call a lone last word an orphan. Purists call it a runt.

• Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (1992)
• Wikipedia, “Widows and orphans” (on the clashing definitions)

Save this for the next time one word gets left out.