Freestyle
nounA race or event in which competitors may choose their own technique, especially the front crawl in swimming.
How to spell freestyle
9 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce freestyle
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does freestyle mean?
- nounA race or event in which competitors may choose their own technique, especially the front crawl in swimming.
- verbTo perform or improvise without a fixed plan, especially in rap, dance, or sport.
- adjectiveDone without set rules or a prescribed technique.
Freestyle in a sentence
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noun
She qualified for the hundred metre freestyle at the regional trials.
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verb
The rapper could freestyle for several minutes without repeating a line.
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adjective
The festival ended with a freestyle skateboarding contest.
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noun
The coach timed his freestyle split before the relay.
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verb
Dancers often freestyle during the warm-up before rehearsal.
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adjective
His freestyle approach to cooking ignored every recipe in the book.
Where does freestyle come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
This is a transparent English compound, joining 'free' and 'style', but each half has a long history of its own. 'Free' descends from the Old English freo, meaning 'not in bondage, at liberty', a word rooted in an ancient sense of 'dear' or 'belonging to one's own people'. 'Style' arrived through Old French from the Latin stilus, the pointed instrument the Romans used for writing on wax tablets; the spelling drifted toward an 's' because writers wrongly linked it to the unrelated Greek stylos, meaning 'pillar'. The compound itself is modern, taking shape in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to describe a competition or performance in which the participant chooses an unrestricted manner. It first stuck in swimming, where racers were free to use any stroke, and later spread to wrestling, skiing, and improvised rap and dance. The whole word keeps the familiar spellings of both parts, so the trap is simply remembering it is written as one solid word with the doubled 'e' of free meeting the 's' of style.
How the word is built
- free (unrestricted, from Old English freo)
- style (manner, from Latin stilus)
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