This is a narrow view. What about the ".next" element of a linked list node that's moved to the tail of the list? If you're not using null to indicate end of list, .next is semantically wrong but harmless.<p>Perhaps a better example is Knuth's Dancing Links. A node is taken out of a larger data structure, pointers left unchanged, because the node will be reinserted later.<p>"Dangling pointer" is intuitive, but ultimately too broad to have much meaning.