Sort of. There is a bit of a terminology mess there. There used to be actual orphan blocks before we had header-first synchronization, which would be blocks for which we didn’t know the parent block. That can’t happen anymore, because we always announce headers first and only retrieve blocks for which we know the parent block.
We refer to blocks that are not part of the best chain as extinct blocks or stale blocks, but a long time ago someone used the term orphan blocks for that and it stuck. Presumably, the term stems from Bitcoin Core labeling the block reward of a stale block as “orphaned” in the code as it’s not part of the best chain.
Sort of. There is a bit of a terminology mess there. There used to be actual orphan blocks before we had header-first synchronization, which would be blocks for which we didn’t know the parent block. That can’t happen anymore, because we always announce headers first and only retrieve blocks for which we know the parent block.
We refer to blocks that are not part of the best chain as extinct blocks or stale blocks, but a long time ago someone used the term orphan blocks for that and it stuck. Presumably, the term stems from Bitcoin Core labeling the block reward of a stale block as “orphaned” in the code as it’s not part of the best chain.
Also see: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/5859/5406