Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 January 10

= January 10 =

Term for person who has lost their child(ren).
A woman whose spouse has died is called a widow and a man in the same position is called a widower. A person whose parents have died is called an orphan, though that's usually reserved for minors. But is there a term for a person whose child(ren) have died? The closest I can think of is bereaved, but that's typically used as an adjective, as in bereaved (widow/mother/etc.). Is there such a term? Matt Deres (talk) 21:17, 10 January 2023 (UTC)


 * There's an ancient Greek word teknoleter (vowels epsilon, omicron, epsilon, eta -- I can't paste in the real Greek letters at the moment). Of course, that doesn't help with English... AnonMoos (talk) 01:45, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
 * LSJ has: (teknoléteira), . The term occurs syncopated as Ηλέκτρα (Σοφοκλή) in Sophocles' Electra (v. 107), but in some editions as . The second part of the compound  is apparently a feminine variant of masculine  (oletḗr), meaning "destroyer", "murderer". In the translation by Jebb this is "like the nightingale, slayer of her offspring". This refers to the myth of Procne, who murdered her son and was transformed into a nightingale (according to Ovid a swallow).  --Lambiam 08:52, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Whatever -- It says very clearly on page 696 of the "Little Liddell" (as they sometimes used to call it) that ΤΕΚΝΟΛΕΤΗΡ is the basic term, meaning "losing or having lost one's children", while teknoleteira is a derived feminine (formed with a historical -ya suffix) with specialized meaning. Paidoleter is a different word, meaning "child-murdering"... AnonMoos (talk) 22:45, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Here the term is glossed as "the destroyer of his children". So it is found in some dictionaries. But is it attested in any actual uses?  --Lambiam 16:21, 12 January 2023 (UTC)


 * According to DRAE, huérfano has also a poetic meaning of "somebody whose children have died".
 * orbus has
 * (with genitive or ab + ablative) bereaved, bereft, deprived (of) by death
 * orphaned, parentless; fatherless
 * childless
 * widowed
 * --Error (talk) 02:23, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
 * In German you say "de:verwaiste Eltern" (literal translation: orphaned parents). But this seems not common in English. The German WP-article doesn't have any interwiki-link. 91.54.32.105 (talk) 08:18, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
 * But Wiktionary has "verwaisen 2. (rare, of a parent) to lose one's child". --Lambiam 09:47, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I haven't heard it used liked that since about 40-50 years...it seems to be very rare indeed. There might be regional differences too, of course. Lectonar (talk) 09:51, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Preitler (2015) Grief and Disappearance claims there is no word in English. Doesn't mention anything for German either, despite her being a lecturer at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria.
 * "Orphaned parents" might be used, but it's also used to mean parents whose children have moved too far away to visit. — kwami (talk) 09:24, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I cannot come up with a specific English language term for this but I can say that my older son and his partner lost a perfect, full term baby boy at birth, due to an umbilical cord accident. That was 7-1/2 years ago. It was a devastating loss that too often splits couples apart. But they stuck together and we now have a delightful five year old granddaughter beloved by all who know her. I have worked on two articles, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (organization) and Rainbow babies, specifically inspired by my grandson's death and my granddaughter's birth. Perhaps you can find some linguistic clues there. Cullen328 (talk) 09:51, 11 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Thank you all for the discussion; I guess there is no English word (or, if there is one, it's very obscure). It's kind of an odd situation; given how high infant mortality was, you'd think this was something we'd have a word for. Or perhaps it was too common an occurrence to merit a special name. Matt Deres (talk) 14:19, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Not a single word, but "bereaved parent" has plenty of Google results, like this or this for example. Alansplodge (talk) 18:04, 11 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Anson Cameron has written: A parent is not only heartbroken but also outraged when a child predeceases them. A sense of temporal justice is broken, a contract with the cosmos.
 * As sad as the loss of a parent or spouse may be, they're more or less expected as part of the natural order of things. The loss of a child is not. It's unspeakable. That may explain why we can't find any languages that have a word for this that's as commonly used as widow/er or orphan. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  18:11, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I think there is some effort to use the word 'vilomah' (from the Sanskrit विलोम meaning 'inverted' ) to name this concept, stemming from a 2009 opinion piece. Shells-shells (talk) 00:18, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I suspect the reason there's no traditional word for this is that unlike widows and orphans, who (in traditional patriarchal societies) have lost their breadwinner and are therefore at risk of poverty and social isolation and in need of special care from the wider society, a parent whose child has died is not societally disadvantaged in any way. After all, infant and child death were so common "back in the day" that virtually everyone who had started having children more than about 15 years ago had already lost one or two. As devastating as it might be to the parent, it didn't change their socioeconomic position the way the death of a husband or father (or even more so, both parents) did. —Mahāgaja · talk 15:52, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
 * In some societies one's offspring also functions as a life insurance for when becoming old and infirm. There, losing all children, as can happen to a couple of no longer child-bearing age, does mean a significant change of their socioeconomic position, now becoming dependent on the charity of others. However, their plight is not substantially different from that of an infertile couple, so a term for a childless person may cover both cases. --Lambiam 16:55, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Widow and orphan are both legal statuses. Alansplodge (talk) 19:04, 15 January 2023 (UTC)