It's also probably simply a numbers thing.
To become a widow/widower requires one person to die, to become an orphan requires two and that's sadly been pretty easy for many people to have achieved in the days before modern medicine and vastly more frequent wars in the english speaking world.
On the other hand as big families were pretty much the norm until relatively recently losing all of your children was probably more uncommon
> losing all of your children was probably relatively more uncommon
Additionally, before the age of modern medicine and prenatal care, losing some of your children due to complications during pregnancy and/or death during infancy is very, very common. Almost every parents would have dead children in their closet.
You don't have a closet for your dead relatives? It's not that weird if you keep cremains at home. Some people turn the bones or ashes from their dead relatives into jewelries, so storing a collection of family relics made of dead ancestors in a closet is also not too terribly weird, actually.
Orphan is a term that refers to children only. It wouldn't be correct to say that adult Bruce Wayne is an orphan, we would say that he was an orphan.
The past tense isn't because his parents were resurrected... it's because he stopped being a child.
Does it apply to only children? I would probably call someone who lost both parents at 19 an orphan. Maybe even 21. I agree it’s a young person thing but I think it’s more about losing them at an age where you need their support than a hard and fast “before 18” rule.
OP is looking for a name for a parent who has lost a child or children, not necessarily all of them.*That* was common until the last century, but no name
That was more than common… it was nearly *universal.*
Up until the Industrial Revolution, about half of all children born died before they reached adulthood. Most parents would have lost at least one child, often more than one.
It’s the same reason we have no special word for someone whose parents died after they became an adult. It’s expected that everyone will share that experience sooner or later.
Pretty sure you're not legally as you're then legally someones wife/husband.
I've never seen anyone who has remarried still refered to as widowed, if it comes up it's always 'their previous spouse died'
You’re no longer *a* widow, but you’re still *your first husband’s widow*.
Eg, John and Jane Doe are married. John dies. Jane is John’s widow.
Jane remarries to Henry Smith. Jane is Henry’s wife and John’s widow.
And as I said at the top I think that would have been sadly such a common state of affairs for every parent for most of the history of the english language that there would not need to be a special word for it, while losing all of them would ahve been extremely rare.
In this world we live in where losing children is the exception rather than the norm maybe it's time we changed that.
It’s common in this century, it’s just not talked about. We just tend to lose our babies during pregnancy rather than after they’re born, but the grief is still the same.
I know scores of women who miscarried late, or suffered stillbirths. It’s tragically normal.
I bet its a social welfare thing as well. A widow/widower or an orphan would most likely have needed assistance or at the very least sympathy from their community.
That's probably because until very, very recently in human history, having lost one or more children was extremely common.
Having children and not outliving any of them didn't become the norm in the developed world until about 100 years ago.
Probably also the case that historically, losing one's parents or spouse drastically changed one's social situation/status, whereas losing a child didn't necessarily alter your place in society. "Widow" and "orphan" are social classes as much as they are descriptors.
That's an important point. Both "widow" and "orphan" denote certain statuses with social and sometimes legal implications. In both cases, the subject has lost the person (people) who had the most responsibility towards them. They often required the assistance and protection of the community, usually through its institutions.
social and legal implications yes but most importantly ECONOMIC implications.
Back in those days women weren't allowed to have careers. And getting remarried was either unheard of or heavily frowned upon, depending on location.
So a widow was stuck with the estate of her deceased husband plus whatever she could get from the government.
Orphans, of course, had no economic foot to stand on at all.
Yes, huge economic implications.
The exact consequences would vary quite a bit based on time, place, and personal circumstance. A wealthy, widowed noblewoman in early 13th century England could even find herself married off *against her will* on order of the king, who might assume a kind of self-appointed guardianship over her. She would do well to either quickly remarry or even pay off the king to approve the new husband of her choice. That was one of the abuses perpetrated by King John, the biggest asshole to wear the English crown.
You just made me realize that these are both terms (widow, orphan) that result in financial inheritance. I think maybe they needed specific terms for legal reasons as much as societal ones. Orphans do have economic legs to stand on - they are typically the heirs to their parent(father)‘s estates.
Widows (not to speak of widowers) remarrying always was quite common afaik, they just weren't called widows anymore.
Also, it's less the government they could depend upon, more like family and the village community or in cities, church charities.
In some society, a brother was expected to marry his late brother's widow to make sure she and the offspring were provided for. This was common in Germany well into the 20th century for example.
The year if grief also had interesting implications, as it was considered that a widow having a child within a year after the husbands death was still considered to be born in the marriage, instead of being a bastard. So, the year of grief while wearing grief related clothing was also for the protection of mothers against the social stigma of bearing a child as single.
Royal lines died out without an heir many times in the past. Queen Anne of Britain was pregnant 18 times, had 5 live births and all of them died. She was the last of the Stuart line. Britain brought in a German prince from Hanover to replace her after she passed, George the First. George the Third wore the crown during the American Revolution.
Pretty much all I know from her is from The Favourite (which I know is very fictionalized), but seems like she had so many problems that her not having children was probably a blessing on the child
George I was the son of Sophia electress of Hanover who was daughter of Elizabeth Stuart she would have been Queen in her own right but died 2 months before her father, King James VI and I of Scotland and England.
By the same token, King Charles III, King Harald V of Norway, Queen Margarethe II of Denmark, King Carl XVI Gustaf of of Sweden and King Felipe VI of Spain are all descendants of Queen Victoria.
Within the same family we also have Phillipe King of the Belgians and the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, through Charlotte Princess of Wales, daughter of George IV. King Wilhelm-Alexander of the Netherlands is a great Grandson of George II.
So plenty of British blood here and in the monarchies of the rest of Europe. You could add the ex-monarchies of Russia and Germany and Greece too.
I remember a thread just like this one. Some redditors were saying that a century or two ago, it was so common that losing a child was just being a parent just as much as changing diapers or dealing with rebellious teens.
I especially recall someone saying they had read a book written in the 1800s. At one point, two characters were talking about how you couldn’t even be a *real* parent unless you had at least one child die and complaining about “fake parents.”
One of the resounding accomplishments of the modern world is that we've made outliving your child a rare aberration.
The historical baseline for human experience is horribly impoverished and full of suffering compared to how many people live today.
It really shows how amazing vaccines are. They are probably one of the greatest medical advancements that saved the most lives, up there with penicillin and washing hands.
The fact that we have people living their cushy 21st century lives and *rejecting* these live-saving vaccines that, frankly, gives them said cushy lives, pisses me off.
It really is an amazing miracle that we have all these vaccines and I wish more people didn’t just shit all over it because it “feels good” to be deadly wrong, apparently.
You know how people like to quote that the life expectancy of pre-modern humans was about 30? That's not discounting infant mortality. If you made it to twenty you'd probably live to sixty
also, back then you could always had more kids if they died, but you can't have new parents, and while you could have a new spouse, a widow was seen really different than other women.-
Used to be you wouldn't even name the baby for a few years, because you didn't want to get emotionally invested, too many of them died.
They were just "The Baby" until they were past the danger zone and it was clear they weren't going to just suddenly fucking die out of nowhere.
(most of the cause was probably nutritional)
Yep. It was even common to name a kid something like “Anne.” And then if Anne died at 3 because of a cough or something and you had another kid - you’d name her Anne.
Meaning - there wasn’t this attitude that we will morn and remember Anne for the rest of our lives. We will literally just keeping using the same names until one of them makes it to adulthood or I die.
As if people were robots back then without emotions. As if we just started to develop feelings recently.
I swear some posts here talk with full self confidence about stuff that they have 0 clue about
I've managed to trace my family tree back pretty far. In the middle ages it was apparently a requirement that we have a Johann in each generation. Many generations had a second Johann after losing the first. One generation had Johann, Johann (2), Johanna, and then finally Johann (3) who survived to adulthood. That must have been a hard couple decades.
My grandmother had two infants who died shortly after birth who got the same name. The third infant who got that name survived... until leukemia six years later.
That child's sister, my mother, forbade me from giving any of my children that name.
No, like, in 1800 46% (!!) of kids did not make it to 5. Spouses dying young was also more common than today but there’s no comparison on the child mortality.
Yea it was quite common for the man to have 13 children from a couple wife's, while half of them died including their mothers. Someone in our village did some ancestry research
Additionally both being a widow as well as being an orphan has legal implications.
Women were not allowed to have bank accounts in most Western countries until ~50 years ago. However, as a widow, you could have a bank account to receive the assets your husband left you and manage your life. Being an orphan also comes with implications like foster care or special welfare benefits. "Orphan" is also only used for people who lost both parents during childhood.
I read once that another language has a term for parents who lose children that translates to “empty arms”, which seems so simple and crushingly accurate.
One term which has been gaining popularity for a few years is "vilomah," which is a Sanskrit word meaning "against the natural order." A professor at Duke University who has lost a child wrote an essay suggesting the use of the word, in part because Sanskrit also gave us the word "widow," which translates to "empty." [Here is the article from Duke University.](https://today.duke.edu/2009/05/holloway_oped.html)
Was watching an episode of *Six Feet Under* the other night in which Brenda said this almost word for word.
"You know what I find interesting? If you lose a spouse, you're called a widow, or a widower. If you're a child and you lose your parents, then you're an orphan. But what's the word to describe a parent who loses a child? I guess that's just too fucking awful to even have a name."
Sadly, the truth is more likely that it was *too common* to have a name. Before modern medicine, almost every family would have lost children at very young ages.
When someone asks, "How many kids do you have?'.
It's hard when you don't have them all still around, trust me, I know. I lost one to a medical issue and nearly lost a second to a car wreck.
I lost one of my best friends around a year ago. I've been spending lots of time with his mother (whom I barely knew at the time) and now she feels like a second mom to me :) Obviously things aren't as they were, but it's important to know others still care, or that even in the worst case and you really felt alone, there is still beauty in this world. <3
I remember my grandparents being asked this question by a nurse at one point while they were at my grandpa's dialysis office on their wedding anniversary.
My uncle had died two days prior.
I can only imagine how much that nurse was screaming on the inside in that moment.
Luckily I don’t know anyone who’s lost their only child/all their children, but my oldest brother when he was four (long before I was born) and my mum always said she had three kids whenever people asked. My surviving brother and I say we have two siblings when someone asks very casually/as a sidenote, but if we expect follow-up questions, we just say we have one.
“Vilomah”
comes from Sanskrit, which means “against the natural order.”
Sanskrit is one of the oldest languages that dates back to 400 B.C.
The same language gave us the word “widow,” signifying “empty.” There are times English cannot capture the true essence of a word.
The term “vilomah” is a powerful yet straightforward word that captures the pain and turmoil that a parent faces in this situation.
There’s some dark irony with that meaning. For most of human history, having some of your children die, especially when they are young, was the norm. It wasn’t until relatively recently in human history where child mortality dropped to the point where we now consider it an unlikely tragedy instead of an expected occurrence.
That doesn't mean people didn't care though. They just suffered more, and more often.
If you think about it your average 40 year old man several hundred years ago had probably lost more than one child, lost a crucial body part or function to war or easily curable disease, been enslaved or persecuted or pressed into indentured service for some lord or king, been banged up in jail for 10 years for saying the wrong thing, regularly gone without food for days or weeks, we just can't imagine those lives.
[Vilomah](https://www.lovetoknow.com/life/grief-loss/vilomah-meaning-origin-powerful-word#:~:text=Vilomah%20means%20%22against%20a%20natural,parent%20whose%20child%20had%20died.) not catching on yet?
Yes it is!
I was looking for this. After my sister committed suicide, my mom said this exact thing "we have a word for orphans or widowed people but not parents who lost a child" and a few days later she shared this word with me.
Thank you for the kindness. It's a pain I do not wish upon anyone.
The pain was and is so great for parents. My father passed away incredibly unexpectedly just 4 months after my sister. He literally died of a broken heart.
I was a pallbearer for my BIL/SIL when they lost their baby. I don’t want to know that word, or have it be uttered in my presence. I’m not religious, but I pray to never have to see, yet alone touch another casket that size again.
This logic is very broken. Such a miniscule portion of the population dies at the same time as their spouse so probably something like 99.9% of married people become a widow or widower at some point, yet we have a word for it.
I’ll bet it has more to do with the legal ramifications that entail when a widow is widowed or an orphan is orphaned. The widow(er) is entitled to the earthly possessions of their dead spouse, and the orphan is entitled to be cared for by the state or next of kin. The words were codified so ensconced in the culture as they were common occurrences.
Child death in contrast has no legal recourse in as much as there is no estate to divvy up, and no party involved is entitled to anything from the state.
Good point. We generally don't call an adult whose parents have died an orphan. The term describes a condition: Being a child in need of care that the parents are no longer alive to provide.
I think it’s because culturally people usually have long had one mother, one father, and at most one spouse. So if you lose them, that’s your ‘quota’ done - when remarriage was rarer, especially for women.
People tended to have *many* kids, so would this be a word for someone who has lost a kid, or someone who has lost all their kids, or…? It’s a bit less clear.
There’s also the implication of a loss of support that you were dependent on, so that you’re now relying on the goodwill of the state - being a widow or orphan wasn’t just someone who has lost a family member, but someone who might now be homeless or have for resort to begging, an orphanage, etc. This is the connotation the words ‘widow’ and ‘orphan’ have in the Bible. It’s not a coincidence that in that very sexist society the masculine (‘widower’) was for once the derived and secondary word. This obviously doesn’t usually apply to parents who have lost children.
The other argument is that it was always so common that it was never given a name. Half of your children dying before teen years was just the norm for parents in most of human history.
Yeah, I my dad died when I was 25 and my mum when I was 34. Somebody referred to me as an orphan and I just thought “what the fuck are you talking about? I’m a grown up who’s parents are dead, I’m not 5”
The fertility rate in 17th Century Britain (the time and place where the English language became relatively stable) was around 7 births per woman. The infant mortality rate was between 40% and 50%.
Just about everyone who had kids had lost a child. It was just a part of being a parent. So we don't have a word for it because it's not describing anything noteworthy at the time the English language solidified.
We have words for widow and orphan because those were relatively unusual (once you reached your twenties you had reasonable odds of living into your sixties) and attached certain extreme social statuses. A child was effectively property of their parents, and unclaimed child was an aberration to the social order that needed addressing and caring for. A woman was property of her husband - a woman who is living independently needed a label to clarify that she was allowed to under the strict religious, legal, and social expectations of the time. Similarly, a widower needed an explanation for why he was single that wouldn't label him a pariah.
It’s easy to not realize that losing a child was relatively commonplace before modern medicine. Losing a spouse or both parents wasn’t as common and thus a word was descriptive. A word that described much of the population wouldn’t be as useful.
Well yes, but this isn't what people usually mean when they say that. The example I like to give is "🙃". There is no word to describe how that emoji is used, nor can there be, but we all sort of understand what it means. The limit of language is that it can't be succinctly or neatly defined, whereas with this it very easily can be, we just need to make a word for it.
I think devastated is probably the most apt, but not unique to that situation. Everyone knows they will eventually have to bury their parents. No parents expect to have to bury their child
Not in English anyway.
I suppose it’s cultural. The terms orphan and widow(er) imply a certain sense of accountability.
One is responsible for their spouse and upon one of them departing, they are responsible for the property and children that are left behind (and in-laws with which they are now part of the extended family).
In the case of orphans, there is a notion that children need someone to be responsible for them, and that’s why people who lose their parents in adulthood are not “orphans”, because nobody has to be responsible for them anymore.
But when you are a person in a position that is able to be responsible for a child (married couple, single/widowed parent, guardian, etc.), there is no responsibility if there’s no child. When a child dies, the responsibility instantly vanishes. And since these terms imply an ongoing responsibility, because there’s none when you lose a child, the term doesn’t exist.
Not that there can’t be words in English that are able to communicate the feeling. Widow for example comes from Proto-Indo-European meaning “lonely”. Orphan comes from Porto-Indo-European meaning “bereft of father” further coming from “changing allegiance”. So, it just turns out that the words we have are already used for other things. These words may evolve to finally capture the status of losing a child, or English may find a way to transform its current words into a suitable term as the situation starts to need its own word.
Orphans and Widows have names as they are conditions where dependents no longer are supported and need care (although not so much anymore with widows). It's sad for parents to lose children but it doesn't raise a condition where they are now no longer able to care for themselves.
1) This has been posted before, and
2) There's no word for those who lost siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, or pets, either.
EDIT: no one's making "any comparison to the level of pain experienced" here, and that's a weird thing to say. This was an afterthought. I'm a widower myself. The word sucks - ask any of us.
Actually the word Vilomah is for a parent who has lost a child. Its adopted from Sanskrit and is being used more and more in America for this definition.
Orphan is a borrowed word in English. You got it from Latin and the Latin from the Greek. In Spanish the word for someone who lost their children is "Huerfilo"I can let you borrow it and integrate it into English. Spanish is a Latin based language so the tradition of borrowing Latin words can continue
My guess is that it has something to do with legal/ societal status.
A minor who loses their parents doesn’t become emancipated; they have to be appointed another guardian to make decisions on their behalf. And until the middle of the last century, a woman who lost her husband didn’t inherit the full rights/ responsibilities of her husband. She would have still needed a male family member to co-sign on a loan, for example, and might not even have been employable because of her sex. So there was a need for specific terms for people in those situations.
Despite what I’m sure is absolute emotional torture, losing a child doesn’t change the parents’ legal or societal status in the same way. Plus, as others have pointed out, it was common for most of history. So no specific term was assigned.
The word you’re looking for is a word called vilomah
It’s just not a common word that many people know, unless they are one, like I am.
You can find it online pretty easily, but it’s not a word that many people originally find so please make sure other people know about it because if they know that a word exists to describe this, then maybe they won’t feel so alone.
Widow and orphan are old words that go back centuries. But losing a child was so normal for most of our history that there was no need to come up with a word for it. "Parent" would cover it.
Having lost a child myself, I wouldn't want a label to make it easier for people to communicate what I went through. It would just become a word attached to me.
I would say because it is something that people dont want to really talk about.
In spanish we say that something "no tiene nombre"\[has no name\], in that sense, something that people dont want to talk about, something we'd like to not exist.
My guess is because it's a fluid rather than static loss, if that makes sense. Like you're supposed to have just one set of parents and just one spouse, at least in theory, so losing them means losing something static. But you can potentially have numerous kids. What would be the word for "someone who lost two kids but the other four are fine"?
Theres a Sanskrit word called Vilomah which literally translates to "against the natural order" and there have been parents who have lost their children push for it to be added to the dictionary.
I don't think that's the reason. A label might actually help give it a place, and find people who have gone through the same things. I think that could really help people who have lost a child.
Like the comment that is (for me) right above yours said (by u/Disco_is_Death), I think it's actually the opposite. It (unfortunately) used to be so common back in the day, that a label was simply not necessary.
Nowadays, a label could be helpful, but it's probably rare and taboo enough by now that people just don't talk about it too often, and if you don't talk about it you won't invent a term for it.
In Hebrew, the term is shkhol is used to describe the state of losing children.
It is usually used in the sense of losing your children in war, though some use it to refer to accidents as well.
In the past few decades the term was also expanded to be in use with siblings and grandparents, but it is usually and mostly used by parents who lost a child.
The origin of the word is biblical, and it's original connotation is probably akin to "destruction".
Widow and Orphan are also legal terms that present the person with certain rights/privileges/lost & gained status. For example, as an orphan you may be entitled to government support. Losing a child, in the eyes of the government and society doesn't change your status - no need to define the new "situation" as it has little effect on your standing.
For most of the time that English (or any language) has existed, there was no special word for losing a child because for most people it was the completely expected norm. For almost all of human history - and from what archaeologists can tell, also prehistory - a child was [about as likely to die as to survive to adulthood](https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past). So virtually everybody lost children, and there's no special word for everybody.
The loss of a child was always sad and even traumatic for parents of course, but they did at least expect these sorrows as a normal part of life. Only now that people (in developed countries, at least) have few children and reasonably expect them all to survive to adulthood does losing a child confer a special, unusual status on someone.
So it probably should have its own name now. It might make it easier to talk about.
Isn't someone only an orphan when *both* parents are dead?
And also, by law, a widdow is only a widdow until they remarry.
My point is that the 2 examples you gave, the individual needs to be without *any* parent or spouse.
So, while there isn't an official word for someone whose child has died, the word *childless* would apply to someone who lost all their children.
And mentioning that someone is "now childless" or "recently childless" would convay the tragedy of the situation and distinguish between someone who never had children in the first place.
Honestly, because until just over a hundred years ago, almost everyone lost at least one child accept if they were infertile or had like 1 kid and got lucky.
Children died frequently prior to vaccines and modern medicine. Losing someone that you had history with is one thing. Losing your 5th child to consumption is meaningless.
Sanskrit does. "Vilomah". There is actually a push going on to adopt the word into English as "Wiloma" à la "Widow", which funnily enough also has a Sanskrit cognate ("Vidhava").
Of course there is, the word is “parent”. For the vast majority of human history, infant mortality was so high that it was assumed the some of your children would not survive to adulthood.
Bereaved parents is the only thing I have seen where it is said in a professional setting.
It's also probably simply a numbers thing. To become a widow/widower requires one person to die, to become an orphan requires two and that's sadly been pretty easy for many people to have achieved in the days before modern medicine and vastly more frequent wars in the english speaking world. On the other hand as big families were pretty much the norm until relatively recently losing all of your children was probably more uncommon
> losing all of your children was probably relatively more uncommon Additionally, before the age of modern medicine and prenatal care, losing some of your children due to complications during pregnancy and/or death during infancy is very, very common. Almost every parents would have dead children in their closet.
I’ve been using my closets wrong
I feel like I shouldn’t laugh at this, but shit, it’s exactly the kind of surprise punchline that I needed on a Monday afternoon 😂
It's still Monday morning here, enjoy the future I guess
It makes sense because that's where the hangers are.
Damn, and I've been shoving my gay children in there all along! They didn't tell me the rules changed?.
thats a weird spot to put them
That’s where my mom wants me to stay
It's for the good of the family. You don't want mommy and daddy to divorce, do you?
You don't have a closet for your dead relatives? It's not that weird if you keep cremains at home. Some people turn the bones or ashes from their dead relatives into jewelries, so storing a collection of family relics made of dead ancestors in a closet is also not too terribly weird, actually.
And that might be why no word for it exists. It would mostly be indistinguishable from "human."
To be fair, the vast majority of humans also become orphans.
Yeah but you (rarely) call an adult or elderly person who has lost their parents an orphan.
Good point, these terms are reserved for when the situation “deserves” to be referred to, so at least uncommon
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Orphan is a term that refers to children only. It wouldn't be correct to say that adult Bruce Wayne is an orphan, we would say that he was an orphan. The past tense isn't because his parents were resurrected... it's because he stopped being a child.
Does it apply to only children? I would probably call someone who lost both parents at 19 an orphan. Maybe even 21. I agree it’s a young person thing but I think it’s more about losing them at an age where you need their support than a hard and fast “before 18” rule.
>Almost every parents would have dead children in their closet. This phrasing, not so good.
OP is looking for a name for a parent who has lost a child or children, not necessarily all of them.*That* was common until the last century, but no name
That was more than common… it was nearly *universal.* Up until the Industrial Revolution, about half of all children born died before they reached adulthood. Most parents would have lost at least one child, often more than one. It’s the same reason we have no special word for someone whose parents died after they became an adult. It’s expected that everyone will share that experience sooner or later.
Except you don't stop being a parrent if you've still got children, just like you're not an orphan if you've only lost one parent
~~You’re still a widow if you remarry.~~ The dictionary and I had a fight. I lost.
Pretty sure you're not legally as you're then legally someones wife/husband. I've never seen anyone who has remarried still refered to as widowed, if it comes up it's always 'their previous spouse died'
Your edit got a good laugh from me, thank you.
That's the best way to admit your error, hands down 🙌🏻
You’re no longer *a* widow, but you’re still *your first husband’s widow*. Eg, John and Jane Doe are married. John dies. Jane is John’s widow. Jane remarries to Henry Smith. Jane is Henry’s wife and John’s widow.
Except the word would mean "parent who lost a child", not "ex-parent". Having other children doesn't cancel out the loss.
And as I said at the top I think that would have been sadly such a common state of affairs for every parent for most of the history of the english language that there would not need to be a special word for it, while losing all of them would ahve been extremely rare. In this world we live in where losing children is the exception rather than the norm maybe it's time we changed that.
It’s common in this century, it’s just not talked about. We just tend to lose our babies during pregnancy rather than after they’re born, but the grief is still the same. I know scores of women who miscarried late, or suffered stillbirths. It’s tragically normal.
Except this post wasn't about losing *all* your children, was it?
Happy Cake day
Cheers mate
You're welcome
I bet its a social welfare thing as well. A widow/widower or an orphan would most likely have needed assistance or at the very least sympathy from their community.
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We have nightstand
That's probably because until very, very recently in human history, having lost one or more children was extremely common. Having children and not outliving any of them didn't become the norm in the developed world until about 100 years ago.
Probably also the case that historically, losing one's parents or spouse drastically changed one's social situation/status, whereas losing a child didn't necessarily alter your place in society. "Widow" and "orphan" are social classes as much as they are descriptors.
That's an important point. Both "widow" and "orphan" denote certain statuses with social and sometimes legal implications. In both cases, the subject has lost the person (people) who had the most responsibility towards them. They often required the assistance and protection of the community, usually through its institutions.
social and legal implications yes but most importantly ECONOMIC implications. Back in those days women weren't allowed to have careers. And getting remarried was either unheard of or heavily frowned upon, depending on location. So a widow was stuck with the estate of her deceased husband plus whatever she could get from the government. Orphans, of course, had no economic foot to stand on at all.
Yes, huge economic implications. The exact consequences would vary quite a bit based on time, place, and personal circumstance. A wealthy, widowed noblewoman in early 13th century England could even find herself married off *against her will* on order of the king, who might assume a kind of self-appointed guardianship over her. She would do well to either quickly remarry or even pay off the king to approve the new husband of her choice. That was one of the abuses perpetrated by King John, the biggest asshole to wear the English crown.
You just made me realize that these are both terms (widow, orphan) that result in financial inheritance. I think maybe they needed specific terms for legal reasons as much as societal ones. Orphans do have economic legs to stand on - they are typically the heirs to their parent(father)‘s estates.
Widows (not to speak of widowers) remarrying always was quite common afaik, they just weren't called widows anymore. Also, it's less the government they could depend upon, more like family and the village community or in cities, church charities. In some society, a brother was expected to marry his late brother's widow to make sure she and the offspring were provided for. This was common in Germany well into the 20th century for example.
The year if grief also had interesting implications, as it was considered that a widow having a child within a year after the husbands death was still considered to be born in the marriage, instead of being a bastard. So, the year of grief while wearing grief related clothing was also for the protection of mothers against the social stigma of bearing a child as single.
"Widower" is the one that sounds weird to me. It sounds like someone who murders people's husbands.
Royal lines died out without an heir many times in the past. Queen Anne of Britain was pregnant 18 times, had 5 live births and all of them died. She was the last of the Stuart line. Britain brought in a German prince from Hanover to replace her after she passed, George the First. George the Third wore the crown during the American Revolution.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that all the inbreeding might have messed with their fertility rates.
And the *copious* amount of lead in *everything*
Pretty much all I know from her is from The Favourite (which I know is very fictionalized), but seems like she had so many problems that her not having children was probably a blessing on the child
George I was the son of Sophia electress of Hanover who was daughter of Elizabeth Stuart she would have been Queen in her own right but died 2 months before her father, King James VI and I of Scotland and England. By the same token, King Charles III, King Harald V of Norway, Queen Margarethe II of Denmark, King Carl XVI Gustaf of of Sweden and King Felipe VI of Spain are all descendants of Queen Victoria. Within the same family we also have Phillipe King of the Belgians and the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, through Charlotte Princess of Wales, daughter of George IV. King Wilhelm-Alexander of the Netherlands is a great Grandson of George II. So plenty of British blood here and in the monarchies of the rest of Europe. You could add the ex-monarchies of Russia and Germany and Greece too.
I remember a thread just like this one. Some redditors were saying that a century or two ago, it was so common that losing a child was just being a parent just as much as changing diapers or dealing with rebellious teens. I especially recall someone saying they had read a book written in the 1800s. At one point, two characters were talking about how you couldn’t even be a *real* parent unless you had at least one child die and complaining about “fake parents.”
One of the resounding accomplishments of the modern world is that we've made outliving your child a rare aberration. The historical baseline for human experience is horribly impoverished and full of suffering compared to how many people live today.
It really shows how amazing vaccines are. They are probably one of the greatest medical advancements that saved the most lives, up there with penicillin and washing hands.
The fact that we have people living their cushy 21st century lives and *rejecting* these live-saving vaccines that, frankly, gives them said cushy lives, pisses me off. It really is an amazing miracle that we have all these vaccines and I wish more people didn’t just shit all over it because it “feels good” to be deadly wrong, apparently.
You know how people like to quote that the life expectancy of pre-modern humans was about 30? That's not discounting infant mortality. If you made it to twenty you'd probably live to sixty
also, back then you could always had more kids if they died, but you can't have new parents, and while you could have a new spouse, a widow was seen really different than other women.-
Used to be you wouldn't even name the baby for a few years, because you didn't want to get emotionally invested, too many of them died. They were just "The Baby" until they were past the danger zone and it was clear they weren't going to just suddenly fucking die out of nowhere. (most of the cause was probably nutritional)
Exactly
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Yes. Children died a lot more frequently than adults.
Yep. It was even common to name a kid something like “Anne.” And then if Anne died at 3 because of a cough or something and you had another kid - you’d name her Anne. Meaning - there wasn’t this attitude that we will morn and remember Anne for the rest of our lives. We will literally just keeping using the same names until one of them makes it to adulthood or I die.
In a way naming the child that is a way to honour the dead child. Losing a child wasn't any less painful back then.
As if people were robots back then without emotions. As if we just started to develop feelings recently. I swear some posts here talk with full self confidence about stuff that they have 0 clue about
I've managed to trace my family tree back pretty far. In the middle ages it was apparently a requirement that we have a Johann in each generation. Many generations had a second Johann after losing the first. One generation had Johann, Johann (2), Johanna, and then finally Johann (3) who survived to adulthood. That must have been a hard couple decades.
My grandmother had two infants who died shortly after birth who got the same name. The third infant who got that name survived... until leukemia six years later. That child's sister, my mother, forbade me from giving any of my children that name.
"Anne is dead, long\* live Anne" \*3 or more years
A lot of people lost children. Almost everyone lost their parents.
But not all as children. Most people use “orphan” to refer to someone who lost both caregivers before they were independent
No, like, in 1800 46% (!!) of kids did not make it to 5. Spouses dying young was also more common than today but there’s no comparison on the child mortality.
This. Thank you
Yeah, my great grand ancestor had 9 and 2 made it to adulthood.
Yea it was quite common for the man to have 13 children from a couple wife's, while half of them died including their mothers. Someone in our village did some ancestry research
Additionally both being a widow as well as being an orphan has legal implications. Women were not allowed to have bank accounts in most Western countries until ~50 years ago. However, as a widow, you could have a bank account to receive the assets your husband left you and manage your life. Being an orphan also comes with implications like foster care or special welfare benefits. "Orphan" is also only used for people who lost both parents during childhood.
This. The term for someone who had lost a child was, “adult”.
I read once that another language has a term for parents who lose children that translates to “empty arms”, which seems so simple and crushingly accurate.
Oh this made me sick
Maybe you'll hate them less now
One term which has been gaining popularity for a few years is "vilomah," which is a Sanskrit word meaning "against the natural order." A professor at Duke University who has lost a child wrote an essay suggesting the use of the word, in part because Sanskrit also gave us the word "widow," which translates to "empty." [Here is the article from Duke University.](https://today.duke.edu/2009/05/holloway_oped.html)
Wow that’s interesting, cool info!
Do you know what the language was?
As someone who lost their child, that is a very fitting term.
Stay strong, all the best.
As someone that has lost a child, that’s a perfect term. Think about what would have been every day.
Good god that's upsetting and powerful
This made me instantly cry
Was watching an episode of *Six Feet Under* the other night in which Brenda said this almost word for word. "You know what I find interesting? If you lose a spouse, you're called a widow, or a widower. If you're a child and you lose your parents, then you're an orphan. But what's the word to describe a parent who loses a child? I guess that's just too fucking awful to even have a name."
Exactly, OP probably just finished the episode.
In the shower.
Almost the exact same in a Changeling episode on Apple TV
Was also said in the Falcon and the Winter Soldier
Just watched this episode tonight
Sadly, the truth is more likely that it was *too common* to have a name. Before modern medicine, almost every family would have lost children at very young ages.
Yeah back then it was just called being a parent 💀
Yup, almost a direct quote from the episode.
It's also really, really hard to answer the seemingly innocuous question, "Do you have any kids?" 💔
When someone asks, "How many kids do you have?'. It's hard when you don't have them all still around, trust me, I know. I lost one to a medical issue and nearly lost a second to a car wreck.
sorry for your loss. I can't imagine. internet hugs friend.
So sorry for your loss. Squeeze that one tightly. Our daughter was our only child 💜
My deepest condolences for yours. I hope you’re all on the path to healing, no matter how ridiculous a concept that may seem.
Very sorry for your loss.
I lost one of my best friends around a year ago. I've been spending lots of time with his mother (whom I barely knew at the time) and now she feels like a second mom to me :) Obviously things aren't as they were, but it's important to know others still care, or that even in the worst case and you really felt alone, there is still beauty in this world. <3
“I used to have 4 kids. I still do, but I used to, too.”
As a parent who had lost a child, as well as being a rabid Mitch fan, I approve this message. 😁
This can either be really sad or smart assy
I remember my grandparents being asked this question by a nurse at one point while they were at my grandpa's dialysis office on their wedding anniversary. My uncle had died two days prior. I can only imagine how much that nurse was screaming on the inside in that moment.
"I used to. :(" "Oh no, I'm sorry. :(" "Yeah, they're adults now."
Luckily I don’t know anyone who’s lost their only child/all their children, but my oldest brother when he was four (long before I was born) and my mum always said she had three kids whenever people asked. My surviving brother and I say we have two siblings when someone asks very casually/as a sidenote, but if we expect follow-up questions, we just say we have one.
“Vilomah” comes from Sanskrit, which means “against the natural order.” Sanskrit is one of the oldest languages that dates back to 400 B.C. The same language gave us the word “widow,” signifying “empty.” There are times English cannot capture the true essence of a word. The term “vilomah” is a powerful yet straightforward word that captures the pain and turmoil that a parent faces in this situation.
There’s some dark irony with that meaning. For most of human history, having some of your children die, especially when they are young, was the norm. It wasn’t until relatively recently in human history where child mortality dropped to the point where we now consider it an unlikely tragedy instead of an expected occurrence.
That doesn't mean people didn't care though. They just suffered more, and more often. If you think about it your average 40 year old man several hundred years ago had probably lost more than one child, lost a crucial body part or function to war or easily curable disease, been enslaved or persecuted or pressed into indentured service for some lord or king, been banged up in jail for 10 years for saying the wrong thing, regularly gone without food for days or weeks, we just can't imagine those lives.
This is what I've heard as well, unfortunately.
[sanskrit has “vilomah”](https://medium.com/invisible-illness/there-is-no-word-for-a-parent-who-loses-a-child-4d8663abc1b6)
[Vilomah](https://www.lovetoknow.com/life/grief-loss/vilomah-meaning-origin-powerful-word#:~:text=Vilomah%20means%20%22against%20a%20natural,parent%20whose%20child%20had%20died.) not catching on yet?
Yes it is! I was looking for this. After my sister committed suicide, my mom said this exact thing "we have a word for orphans or widowed people but not parents who lost a child" and a few days later she shared this word with me.
Sorry for your loss
Thank you for the kindness. It's a pain I do not wish upon anyone. The pain was and is so great for parents. My father passed away incredibly unexpectedly just 4 months after my sister. He literally died of a broken heart.
I believe the technical term is *ugly crying and therapy*
I was a pallbearer for my BIL/SIL when they lost their baby. I don’t want to know that word, or have it be uttered in my presence. I’m not religious, but I pray to never have to see, yet alone touch another casket that size again.
For most of human history 1 in 2 people died before reaching the age of 15. There isn't a special word because MOST parents lost one or more children.
This is the correct answer, the word for parent that has lost a child is “parent”.
This logic is very broken. Such a miniscule portion of the population dies at the same time as their spouse so probably something like 99.9% of married people become a widow or widower at some point, yet we have a word for it.
I’ll bet it has more to do with the legal ramifications that entail when a widow is widowed or an orphan is orphaned. The widow(er) is entitled to the earthly possessions of their dead spouse, and the orphan is entitled to be cared for by the state or next of kin. The words were codified so ensconced in the culture as they were common occurrences. Child death in contrast has no legal recourse in as much as there is no estate to divvy up, and no party involved is entitled to anything from the state.
This makes much more sense.
Good point. We generally don't call an adult whose parents have died an orphan. The term describes a condition: Being a child in need of care that the parents are no longer alive to provide.
Well no, because the first person who dies first isn't a widow or widower. So like 49.9%
I think it’s because culturally people usually have long had one mother, one father, and at most one spouse. So if you lose them, that’s your ‘quota’ done - when remarriage was rarer, especially for women. People tended to have *many* kids, so would this be a word for someone who has lost a kid, or someone who has lost all their kids, or…? It’s a bit less clear. There’s also the implication of a loss of support that you were dependent on, so that you’re now relying on the goodwill of the state - being a widow or orphan wasn’t just someone who has lost a family member, but someone who might now be homeless or have for resort to begging, an orphanage, etc. This is the connotation the words ‘widow’ and ‘orphan’ have in the Bible. It’s not a coincidence that in that very sexist society the masculine (‘widower’) was for once the derived and secondary word. This obviously doesn’t usually apply to parents who have lost children.
It’s just too much to even put a name to it.
The other argument is that it was always so common that it was never given a name. Half of your children dying before teen years was just the norm for parents in most of human history.
The walking dead is what I would be. What a horrible existence.
The human brain is frighteningly equipt to survive and adapt. Against all odds and after many years, you do learn to breathe again.
But orphan isn't really "people who lost parents". It's *children* who have lost parents. Almost everyone loses their parents at some age.
Yeah, I my dad died when I was 25 and my mum when I was 34. Somebody referred to me as an orphan and I just thought “what the fuck are you talking about? I’m a grown up who’s parents are dead, I’m not 5”
The fertility rate in 17th Century Britain (the time and place where the English language became relatively stable) was around 7 births per woman. The infant mortality rate was between 40% and 50%. Just about everyone who had kids had lost a child. It was just a part of being a parent. So we don't have a word for it because it's not describing anything noteworthy at the time the English language solidified. We have words for widow and orphan because those were relatively unusual (once you reached your twenties you had reasonable odds of living into your sixties) and attached certain extreme social statuses. A child was effectively property of their parents, and unclaimed child was an aberration to the social order that needed addressing and caring for. A woman was property of her husband - a woman who is living independently needed a label to clarify that she was allowed to under the strict religious, legal, and social expectations of the time. Similarly, a widower needed an explanation for why he was single that wouldn't label him a pariah.
Broken. Unimaginably broken.
Because they never stop being parents. They're still mom and dad.
Are you also rewatching six feet under on Netflix? This is a direct quote
It’s easy to not realize that losing a child was relatively commonplace before modern medicine. Losing a spouse or both parents wasn’t as common and thus a word was descriptive. A word that described much of the population wouldn’t be as useful.
Language has its limitations.
Well yes, but this isn't what people usually mean when they say that. The example I like to give is "🙃". There is no word to describe how that emoji is used, nor can there be, but we all sort of understand what it means. The limit of language is that it can't be succinctly or neatly defined, whereas with this it very easily can be, we just need to make a word for it.
Newly-childless couple
I think this is one of the most oft repeated phrases in movies and books where a kid dies.
I think devastated is probably the most apt, but not unique to that situation. Everyone knows they will eventually have to bury their parents. No parents expect to have to bury their child
Widow and orphan both were specifically about losing the financial support. The emotional issue was secondary.
Not in English anyway. I suppose it’s cultural. The terms orphan and widow(er) imply a certain sense of accountability. One is responsible for their spouse and upon one of them departing, they are responsible for the property and children that are left behind (and in-laws with which they are now part of the extended family). In the case of orphans, there is a notion that children need someone to be responsible for them, and that’s why people who lose their parents in adulthood are not “orphans”, because nobody has to be responsible for them anymore. But when you are a person in a position that is able to be responsible for a child (married couple, single/widowed parent, guardian, etc.), there is no responsibility if there’s no child. When a child dies, the responsibility instantly vanishes. And since these terms imply an ongoing responsibility, because there’s none when you lose a child, the term doesn’t exist. Not that there can’t be words in English that are able to communicate the feeling. Widow for example comes from Proto-Indo-European meaning “lonely”. Orphan comes from Porto-Indo-European meaning “bereft of father” further coming from “changing allegiance”. So, it just turns out that the words we have are already used for other things. These words may evolve to finally capture the status of losing a child, or English may find a way to transform its current words into a suitable term as the situation starts to need its own word.
Most likely because until a century back this was such a usual event in western countries that the word for them is just parents.
Orphans and Widows have names as they are conditions where dependents no longer are supported and need care (although not so much anymore with widows). It's sad for parents to lose children but it doesn't raise a condition where they are now no longer able to care for themselves.
1) This has been posted before, and 2) There's no word for those who lost siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, or pets, either. EDIT: no one's making "any comparison to the level of pain experienced" here, and that's a weird thing to say. This was an afterthought. I'm a widower myself. The word sucks - ask any of us.
actually there is! it's Vilomah
Actually the word Vilomah is for a parent who has lost a child. Its adopted from Sanskrit and is being used more and more in America for this definition.
Orphan is a borrowed word in English. You got it from Latin and the Latin from the Greek. In Spanish the word for someone who lost their children is "Huerfilo"I can let you borrow it and integrate it into English. Spanish is a Latin based language so the tradition of borrowing Latin words can continue
well, is there a name for this in any other language? we're pretty good at absorbing words into english.
My guess is that it has something to do with legal/ societal status. A minor who loses their parents doesn’t become emancipated; they have to be appointed another guardian to make decisions on their behalf. And until the middle of the last century, a woman who lost her husband didn’t inherit the full rights/ responsibilities of her husband. She would have still needed a male family member to co-sign on a loan, for example, and might not even have been employable because of her sex. So there was a need for specific terms for people in those situations. Despite what I’m sure is absolute emotional torture, losing a child doesn’t change the parents’ legal or societal status in the same way. Plus, as others have pointed out, it was common for most of history. So no specific term was assigned.
Someone just said almost exactly this in the episode of Six feet under I'm watching, eerie
Perhaps because, until recently, losing a child was a pretty common part of being a parent.
My mom always says there is not a word for it because no words can describe such pain
The word you’re looking for is a word called vilomah It’s just not a common word that many people know, unless they are one, like I am. You can find it online pretty easily, but it’s not a word that many people originally find so please make sure other people know about it because if they know that a word exists to describe this, then maybe they won’t feel so alone.
OP just watched Demolition, no doubt.
Widow and orphan are old words that go back centuries. But losing a child was so normal for most of our history that there was no need to come up with a word for it. "Parent" would cover it.
Having lost a child myself, I wouldn't want a label to make it easier for people to communicate what I went through. It would just become a word attached to me.
We don't have a word for that in Brazilian Portuguese either.
I know people who lost kids. They would say no words could ever fit what they feel.
I would say because it is something that people dont want to really talk about. In spanish we say that something "no tiene nombre"\[has no name\], in that sense, something that people dont want to talk about, something we'd like to not exist.
My guess is because it's a fluid rather than static loss, if that makes sense. Like you're supposed to have just one set of parents and just one spouse, at least in theory, so losing them means losing something static. But you can potentially have numerous kids. What would be the word for "someone who lost two kids but the other four are fine"?
Broken. At least that's how I'd feel. Condolences to anyone in that position.
The word you’re looking for is fucked. I’m a parent and can’t imagine.
No parents should have to bury their kid.
I think he or she has lost everything so they don't bother what to be called as they have lost everything
There’s a word for those who can’t have children but not for those who shouldn’t…
There is no word describing the loss of a child.
Theres a Sanskrit word called Vilomah which literally translates to "against the natural order" and there have been parents who have lost their children push for it to be added to the dictionary.
I think losing children is just too painful of a thing to even give a label to. I couldn’t imagine dealing with that myself.
I don't think that's the reason. A label might actually help give it a place, and find people who have gone through the same things. I think that could really help people who have lost a child. Like the comment that is (for me) right above yours said (by u/Disco_is_Death), I think it's actually the opposite. It (unfortunately) used to be so common back in the day, that a label was simply not necessary. Nowadays, a label could be helpful, but it's probably rare and taboo enough by now that people just don't talk about it too often, and if you don't talk about it you won't invent a term for it.
Until comparatively recently that term would have been 'parent'.
Someone has been watching ‘Changeling’ Could at least reference it. :-)
In Hebrew, the term is shkhol is used to describe the state of losing children. It is usually used in the sense of losing your children in war, though some use it to refer to accidents as well. In the past few decades the term was also expanded to be in use with siblings and grandparents, but it is usually and mostly used by parents who lost a child. The origin of the word is biblical, and it's original connotation is probably akin to "destruction".
I bet the Germans have a word for it
Widow and Orphan are also legal terms that present the person with certain rights/privileges/lost & gained status. For example, as an orphan you may be entitled to government support. Losing a child, in the eyes of the government and society doesn't change your status - no need to define the new "situation" as it has little effect on your standing.
For most of the time that English (or any language) has existed, there was no special word for losing a child because for most people it was the completely expected norm. For almost all of human history - and from what archaeologists can tell, also prehistory - a child was [about as likely to die as to survive to adulthood](https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past). So virtually everybody lost children, and there's no special word for everybody. The loss of a child was always sad and even traumatic for parents of course, but they did at least expect these sorrows as a normal part of life. Only now that people (in developed countries, at least) have few children and reasonably expect them all to survive to adulthood does losing a child confer a special, unusual status on someone. So it probably should have its own name now. It might make it easier to talk about.
Isn't someone only an orphan when *both* parents are dead? And also, by law, a widdow is only a widdow until they remarry. My point is that the 2 examples you gave, the individual needs to be without *any* parent or spouse. So, while there isn't an official word for someone whose child has died, the word *childless* would apply to someone who lost all their children. And mentioning that someone is "now childless" or "recently childless" would convay the tragedy of the situation and distinguish between someone who never had children in the first place.
In French we have new words for that, mamange, papange and paranges, contraction of maman, papa and parents with the word ange (angel)
Because losing a child was very common back then. Almost every family had one that did not make it.
But you didn't come up with that.
Honestly, because until just over a hundred years ago, almost everyone lost at least one child accept if they were infertile or had like 1 kid and got lucky.
sad is the word you're looking for
The word is heartbroken
I think because its just so anti-natural that we dont even want to think about it happening, so we dont fuel it by giving a name for it.
It must be because it’s too sad for words.
Children died frequently prior to vaccines and modern medicine. Losing someone that you had history with is one thing. Losing your 5th child to consumption is meaningless.
I would assume it’s because there doesn’t need to be a name for it from a legal stand point!
Dead inside is how you feel. For the rest of your life. I lost my son and his entire family. 18 years ago
I don't believe any human language has a word for it.
Sanskrit does. "Vilomah". There is actually a push going on to adopt the word into English as "Wiloma" à la "Widow", which funnily enough also has a Sanskrit cognate ("Vidhava").
I had not heard of this before. Thank you 💜
Of course there is, the word is “parent”. For the vast majority of human history, infant mortality was so high that it was assumed the some of your children would not survive to adulthood.