what's meaning of orphans in django's paginator?

Question

I found the /django/core/paginator.py source code:

class Paginator(object):
def __init__(self, object_list, per_page, orphans=0, allow_empty_first_page=True):
    self.object_list = object_list
    self.per_page = int(per_page)
    self.orphans = int(orphans)
    self.allow_empty_first_page = allow_empty_first_page
    self._num_pages = self._count = None

what's the attribute orphans meaning?

Answer 1

From the docs

orphans
The minimum number of items allowed on the last page, defaults to zero. Use this when you don’t want to have a last page with very few items. If the last page would normally have a number of items less than or equal to orphans, then those items will be added to the previous page (which becomes the last page) instead of leaving the items on a page by themselves. For example, with 23 items, per_page=10, and orphans=3, there will be two pages; the first page with 10 items and the second (and last) page with 13 items.