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orphanage

nouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈɔː(ɹ)fənɪd͡ʒ//

A residential institution for the care and protection of orphans.

noun

  1. 1

    A residential institution for the care and protection of orphans.

    Near-synonym: children's home (not always different)

  2. 2

    obsoleteOrphanhood; the state of being an orphan.

Etymology

Attested since the 1570s; orphan + -age.

Forms

plural
orphanages
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).