Orphan

One legal definition used in the United States is a minor bereft through "death or disappearance of, abandonment or desertion by, or separation or loss from, both parents".

Judt (2006) estimates there were 9,000 orphaned children in Czechoslovakia, 60,000 in the Netherlands 300,000 in Poland and 200,000 in Yugoslavia, plus many more in the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, China and elsewhere.

Other notable orphans include entertainment greats such as Louis Armstrong, Marilyn Monroe, Babe Ruth, Ray Charles and Frances McDormand.

Examples from classic literature include Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

More recent authors featuring orphan characters include A. J. Cronin, Lemony Snicket, A. F. Coniglio, Roald Dahl and J. K. Rowling.

Supporting characters befriended by the heroes are also often orphans, including the Newsboy Legion and Rick Jones.

Many religious texts, including the Bible and the Quran, contain the idea that helping and defending orphans is a fundamental and God-pleasing matter.

Orphans by Thomas Kennington , oil on canvas , 1885
Orphan on mother's grave (1888)
Orphan on mother's grave by Uroš Predić in 1888
Emperor Pedro II of Brazil and his sisters Princesses Francisca and Januária wearing mourning clothes after the death of their father Pedro I in 1834. Their mother, Maria Leopoldina , had died a couple of years before, in 1826.
Mime offers food to the young Siegfried, an orphan he is raising; Illustration by Arthur Rackham to Richard Wagner 's Siegfried
Mother of Peace AIDS orphanage, Zimbabwe (2005)