Orphan Process
In plain terms
A running process whose parent has terminated.
Going deeper
An orphan process keeps running after its parent exits and is adopted by the init process to be managed. It loses its original parent.
Under the hood
init (PID 1) reparents and eventually reaps orphans; differs from zombies which are already dead.
Examples
Process lifecycle, init adoption, background daemons, reparenting.
Think of it like...
Like a child whose guardian leaves, so a designated caretaker (init) takes over.