free form
1
6.5
- noun
- /fri fɔrm/
- Specialized
:
forma libre
- In the fed state, free form BCAA is more or less useless on a high protein diet.
Examples
-
Do you use free-form amino acids or some other form?
Blog text (15) -
The survey asked students to write in free form what they knew about the Civil War.
Academic text (2015) -
There is a place for free forms: they no longer have to justify themselves.
Academic text (2009) -
The response from the student is written on the first page in free form; no lists or multiple choices are provided.
Academic text (1997) -
Andrew: So how do you make sense of all this free-form information that's coming at you?
Blog text (4) -
The main thing with free form is just patience, though at one stage you think you have a lot of dreads, then they disappear, and then they are back and wonderful. Also, with free form, get ready for crazy locks along with more "normal" ones.
Blog text (27) -
And it's created a friend of mine says Rich, you have you have a you're in a constant state of, of free form, free flowing overwhelm.
-
Although it's free form, some of the potential encounters involve French pirates, native villages along the coast, and a dark horror from the Mesoamerican hinterland.
Blog text (10) -
There are many split tests you can run on your web form: using inline forms vs. pop-ups, including a description of your emails vs. displaying a text-free form, and even using a "Mad Libs"-style form vs. a standard sign-up.
Blog text (1) -
In his poetry, he preferred to write in free form, allowing for creative expression without strict rules.
Synonyms
A part of language that can stand alone as a word
Antonyms
- Specialized
A small part added to a word that cannot stand alone, like -s in cats and -ed in walked
Surface Forms
Morphology
The constituents 'free' (independent/unconstrained) and 'form' (shape/variant) do suggest an "independent form," so a B1 learner might infer it means a form that can stand alone. However, the precise technical sense 'a morpheme that can stand alone as a word' is a domain-specific linguistic meaning and is not fully predictable from everyday uses (and 'free-form' also commonly means 'unstructured'), so prior exposure or explanation is likely needed.
Etymology
The term free form comes from a simple picture: free means not tied and form means a piece or shape, so imagine a piece of language that is not attached to other parts. That's why a free form means a small unit of language that 'can stand alone' as a word.