Widow

A lone word or short line stranded at the end of a paragraph. A small ugliness worth the trouble of fixing.

Typography's strays: the single word left alone on the last line of a paragraph, the lone line stranded at the top of a column. They read as neglect, a paragraph that ends on one abandoned word looks unfinished even to readers who could never name the fault.

The fixes are unglamorous: a hair of tracking, a rewritten phrase, a manual break upstream. On the web, where every screen re-rags every paragraph, perfect control is gone; we guard the moments that matter, headlines, pull quotes, endings, and let body text keep an honest rag elsewhere.