parentless

parent +‎ -less

parentless (not comparable)

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...

   • 2004, Michael Kay, XSLT 2.0 Programmer's Reference:

     Two consequences of parentless elements complicate the rules.

2. (computing) 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.

• fatherless
• motherless

• parentlessness

• half orphan
• orphan