Definition of "parentless"

parentless

adjective
not comparable
1. Having no (living) parent.
  Quotations
  Firstly, then, who were these parentless children who seem to have been present in a sizeable proportion of households...
  1973, Michael Gordon, The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective
  Two consequences of parentless elements complicate the rules.
  2004, Michael Kay, XSLT 2.0 Programmer's Reference
2. (computing) Having no parent in a data structure.
  Quotations
  The top-level window is parentless and forms the root of the hierarchy.
  2012, Michael Lawrence, John Verzani, Programming Graphical User Interfaces in R, page 19