the.com/waif

means A waif is a thin, often homeless or neglected-looking person — originally a stray or ownerless thing or animal, later a stray child, later a look magazines decided was aspirational.

from From Anglo-Norman 'waif,' meaning an unclaimed piece of stray property — specifically, goods or animals found ownerless and, by law, forfeited to the crown if nobody claimed them. It's related to Old Norse 'veif,' something waving or flapping, suggesting an item adrift without a fixed place. The word drifted from legal jargon for lost property to describe lost and homeless people, especially children, by the 1700s-1800s — and from there, in the 1990s, into fashion vocabulary for a deliberately frail, unmoored-looking beauty ideal, stripping the word almost entirely of the poverty it once described.