free fall
6
4.0
- noun
- /fri fɔl/
- Specialized
:
caída libre
- If Baumgartner is successful, his will be the highest jump and longest free fall ever made by a human.
- the plane went into free fall
- go into free fall
- free fall toward Earth
What does the free fall path actually look like on this diagram?
- What does the free fall path actually look like on this diagram?
- This is what physicists mean by free fall in the gravitational field.
- Went to sniper school, went to free fall school and started specializing my efforts on long on the long gun.
- Gabe goes out to, I think he went out to Yuma, or he might have been out to San Diego when they started doing the course out there, the free fall course.
- It's the only program in the in the world that is the first jump is free fall and solo.
Examples
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Here is a simple model of speed in free fall from this altitude.
Blog text (11) -
This is what physicists mean by free fall in the gravitational field.
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So when things are in free fall, they can fall really fast, right?
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What does the free fall path actually look like on this diagram?
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Next thing I know, I'm in free fall.
Fiction book (2001) -
His jump lasted just over 9 minutes, and half of it was in free fall.
Blog text (1) -
In the extreme case of free fall, you feel "weightless."
Blog text (16) -
At 45,000 feet, the free-fall time would be approximately 52 seconds.
Blog text (14) -
Felix destroyed the previous free fall speed record by 219 mph. Wow!
Blog text (32) -
When a skydiver jumps from an airplane, they experience free fall until they deploy their parachute.
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'sudden and sharp decrease' is directly built from 'fall' (a decline) plus 'free' in the sense 'uncontrolled/unrestrained' rather than 'without cost', so the combined sense of an uncontrolled or rapid decline is predictable. This compositional metaphor is common cross-linguistically (e.g. Spanish 'caída libre'), so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will very likely infer the intended meaning.
Etymology
Free fall comes from the simple image of something dropping with nothing to hold it: free meaning 'not held' and fall meaning 'to drop'. That's why the term describes an object moving only under the Earth's pull, with no other forces to slow it down.