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free

Pronunciation: /fɹiː/

The English word “free” has 20 meanings listed here.

adjective

  1. Unconstrained.
  2. Not imprisoned or enslaved.
  3. Generous; liberal.
  4. Clear of offence or crime; guiltless; innocent.
  5. Without obligations.
  6. To be enjoyed by anyone freely.
  7. Upholding individual rights.
  8. With no or only freedom-preserving limitations on distribution or modification.
  9. Intended for release, and omitting debugging diagnostics, as opposed to a checked version.
  10. Obtainable without any payment.
  11. Complimentary.
  12. Left adjoint to a forgetful functor G; such that any map f:X→G(A) induces a universal map ̄f:F(X)→A.
  13. Belonging to the image of some free functor.
  14. Having a set of generators which satisfy no non-trivial relations; equivalently, being the group of reduced words on a set of generators.
  15. Having a linearly independent set of generators (called a basis).
  16. Unconstrained by quantifiers.
  17. Unconstrained of identifiers, not bound.
  18. (of a morpheme) That can be used by itself, unattached to another morpheme.
  19. Unobstructed, without blockages.
  20. Unattached or uncombined.

Etymology

From Middle English fre, from Old English frēo, frēoh, frī, friġ, frīoh (“free”), from Proto-West Germanic *frī, from Proto-Germanic *frijaz (“beloved, not in bondage”), from Proto-Indo-European *priHós (“pleased, loved”), from *preyH- (“to please; to love”). Related to friend. cognates, etc Germanic cognates include Scots fre (“free”), North Frisian frai, frei, fri, Frii (“free”), Saterland…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.