So a 5-line paragraph may not be broken across two pages at all, and 6-line paragraph may only be broken as 3 and 3 lines. The example in the question thus means that a page break may not appear inside a p, h2, or h3 element, unless at least 3 lines of it appear on each page. It’s difficult to find use cases even for these. So why would you set those properties? Normally only as orphans: 1 or widows: 1 or both, to specify that typographic orphans or widows need not be avoided. The initial value of both properties is 2, which thus means that the single line orphans and widows (i.e., orphans and widows in the typographic sense) are to be avoided. It is rather difficult to find use for such a setting. Instead, it says that less than 4 lines of a paragraph at the end of a page be considered an orphan and be avoided. orphans: 4 does not mean four orphans anywhere. The definitions of the CSS properties are somewhat unnatural, since e.g.
![what are widows and orphans in word what are widows and orphans in word](https://www.herronprinting.com/graphics/fixing-typography-example-paragraph.jpg)
These generalizations are not particularly useful there is generally nothing wrong with having two (or three or.) lines of a paragraph on a page other than the rest of the paragraph. The CSS concepts are generalizations of the typographic concepts, replacing “the last line” by “the last few lines” and “the first line” by “the first few lines”.
![what are widows and orphans in word what are widows and orphans in word](https://i0.wp.com/blog.lulu.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Word_Drop_Cap_1-2.png)
They are regarded as avoidable, though opinions disagree on how serious the problems are. So both are single lines that have been isolated from the rest of the paragraph by a page break. In typography, a “widow” is the last line of a paragraph that appears at the start of a new page, and an “orphan” is the first line of a paragraph that appears at the end of a page.