Not counted as a citizen of any country. A stateless person has no country that says "this one is ours". That sounds like a small paper problem, but it is a heavy one: without a country you usually cannot get a passport, so you cannot travel legally; you may not be able to go to school, work legally, open a bank account, get married on paper, or use a hospital. Children born to stateless parents are often born stateless too, so it passes down. People become stateless in several ways — a country breaks apart or disappears, a government takes citizenship away from a group, a child is born in a place where the law does not give them the parents' nationality and the country of birth does not give them its own either. The word is formal and mostly appears in news reports and in the work of the United Nations, in phrases like a stateless person and stateless children. Note it is not the same as refugee. A refugee has run away from a country but usually still legally belongs to it; a stateless person may never have moved at all and still belongs nowhere. Someone can be both. In computing, stateless has a completely separate meaning: a system is stateless when it does not remember anything about what happened before, so each request starts from nothing. Students who read about web servers will meet that one, and it has nothing to do with citizenship.