Learn English – term for an adult without children, similar to “orphan” for the other way around

interpersonal-relationsnouns

For a child without any parents, there is a term – orphan.
Is there such a term for the opposite – an adult without any children?

This question actually comes out of a software development situation where I have nodes that relate to each other as parents and children – a parent node has zero or more children. If a child doesn't have a parent, it's refered to as an orphan node. I'm looking for a term for a node that doesn't have any children. I considered "childless", "non-parent" etc, but was wondering if there is a proper non-negative term similar to orphan?

Edit: I'm not specifically asking for a word for someone who once had children but now doesn't. While orphan implies not only that a child currently has no parents, but (as a consequence of how life works) also that the child used to have parents but lost them; the same is not necessarily true for the term I'm asking about – a term to describe people without children, regardless of whether they did once have children. Bottom line: it's not about having had but lost children but simply about not currently having children, period.

Best Answer

From an English language perspective, there is nothing wrong with the word childless:

[Lexico (Oxford Dictionaries)]
Not having any children.
‘a childless couple’
‘I am childless by choice’
‘For them, a childless marriage is considered a great misfortune.’
‘He left her a childless widow at the age of eighteen.’

However, the word orphan implies a child whose parents have died unnaturally or unexpectedly. Childless covers the state of being without children, but not specifically having had a child who died unnaturally or unexpectedly.

On the other hand, in terms of the niche-specific language of computing, you might want to use leaf node.

From Wikipedia's entry on Node (computer science) (the text in bold is my own emphasis):

  • Child: A child node is a node extending from another node. For example, a computer with internet access could be considered a child node of a node representing the internet. The inverse relationship is that of a parent node. If node C is a child of node A, then A is the parent node of C.
  • Degree: the degree of a node is the number of children of the node.
  • Depth: the depth of node A is the length of the path from A to the root node. The root node is said to have depth 0.
  • Edge: the connection between nodes.
  • Forest: a set of trees.
  • Height: the height of node A is the length of the longest path through children to a leaf node.
  • Internal node: a node with at least one child.
  • Leaf node: a node with no children.
  • Root node: a node distinguished from the rest of the tree nodes. Usually, it is depicted as the highest node of the tree.
  • Sibling nodes: these are nodes connected to the same parent node.
Related Topic