The description of the :parent selector reads:

Select all elements that are the parent of another element, including text nodes.

http://api.jquery.com/parent-selector/

Suppose you have:

<div>

<p id="secret">jQuery is evil!</p>

</div>

It is not clear what jQuery("p:parent") matches. Does it match the div, i.e. the paragraph's parent? Or does it match the paragraph?

The answer is that :parent matches the paragraph. This can be deducted from observation of other selector constructs and the realization that a selector doing the former would be :parent(p), but this is far from obvious. It is not clear that :parent means "is a parent", but not "the parent of". Some have even suggested to rename the selector in the documentation comments. I don't know if this is desirable, but kk and Jakub Konecki suggested ":hasChild" and ":isParent". I did find it very surprising to read that ":parent"'s opposite was ":empty".

Furthermore, the current description implies that text nodes are elements, which is misleading.

A description which would fix both issues would be:

Select all elements that have a child node (either an element or text).