How to avoid orphan word on a line with css?

Question

What I mean with orphans word is a single word on a line. Possible with help of CSS to avoid any line with only one word?

For example SERUM is an orphand word:

ECSTASY OF EXISTENCE FIRMING ANTIOXIDANT BODY
SERUM

It should look like this instead

ECSTASY OF EXISTENCE FIRMING ANTIOXIDANT
BODY SERUM

Answer 1

A quick and easy way to prevent two words from breaking is to insert a non breaking space   between the words

ECSTASY OF EXISTENCE FIRMING ANTIOXIDANT BODY SERUM

It won't be visible on the front end but those words will stay together even if there enough space for just one of them.

<h2>ECSTASY OF EXISTENCE FIRMING ANTIOXIDANT BODY&nbsp;SERUM</h2>

Answer 2

You can do it with white-space: nowrap

span {
  white-space: nowrap;
}

<h2>ECSTASY OF EXISTENCE FIRMING ANTIOXIDANT <span>BODY SERUM</span></h2>

Answer 3

This does not have the best browser support yet, but you can use text-wrap: pretty; to avoid orphans.

CSS

p {
  text-wrap: pretty;
}

HTML

<p>ECSTASY OF EXISTENCE FIRMING ANTIOXIDANT
BODY SERUM</p>

Answer 4

If you're fine using JavaScript, the Adopt-Words library seems to do the job.

https://www.cssscript.com/prevent-orphans-adopt-words/

It's under 2KB in size, though I haven't tested the runtime performance for large pages with a lot of text. By default it doesn't apply itself to the whole page: you specify what you want it to run on. So

AdoptWords.init('.example *', {
  // options here
})

would only prevent orphan words on elements with the class example. You could probably apply it to all p, span or whatever tags, but might incur a harder performance penalty depending on the number of elements affected.

It's MIT licensed. Even when you prettify the code it's only 56 lines, so it's easy to audit.

Hopefully in the future you can just use Kelvyn's answer, but as of early 2024 that's Chromium only. Tim and Alex's comments would add you Firefox support for blocks of text spanning a limited number of lines (six or less for Chromium and ten or less for Firefox), but you'd still miss out on Safari, which might be an issue if many of your users use iOS. It's very well possible that by next year you might be able to use one or both of their answers though.

Until then, I think the Adopt-Words library is probably the best solution. As squarecandy pointed out, the issue with adding   or span tags in the other answers is that

If you automated this, it could break mobile layouts if the last two words are very long. If you don't automate it, it's difficult to train non-technical editors how to implement it correctly.

I'd also add that if you don't automate it, it becomes even more of a headache once you deal with translations for your page. I agree with squarecandy that those answers are very useful in some situations (e.g. if you need to make a change in a pinch or just on one particular page) but I think Adopt-Words might be the cleanest solution for a sitewide approach: you don't have to adjust your HTML at all beyond adding something like

<script src="adopt-words.bundle.js"></script>  
<script>
    AdoptWords.init('.example *', {
      // options here
    })
</script>

and if the user doesn't have JavaScript enabled, it should still fallback gracefully.