Other forms: freelancing, freelanced
A freelance worker sells the same skill to whoever needs it, one job at a time, instead of belonging to one employer. A photographer who shoots a wedding in May and a restaurant menu in June; a translator with four clients, no office and no payslip.
It stretches across the parts of speech: an adjective (freelance journalist, freelance work), a verb (she freelances for three magazines), and an adverb (he went freelance last year). The person is a freelancer, and the older noun a freelance still turns up in print with a slightly formal ring. Freelance is about who pays you, not where you sit, so you can freelance from a client's office and be fully employed from your kitchen table. Tax and insurance follow you rather than an employer, which is why the word lives so close to self-employed. It belongs to skilled one-off jobs above all: writing, design, code, camera work, translation.
1adjectivefreelanceEarning a living by selling your work to different clients rather than working for a single employer.
“He has been a freelance illustrator since he left the agency.”
synonyms: self-employed, independent
2verbtakingTo work this way, taking jobs from several clients.
“She freelances for two newspapers and teaches on Fridays.”
3nounworksA person who works this way.
“The magazine keeps a list of freelances it trusts with a deadline.”
freelance is a way of working.
Also accepted in games: self-employed
Walter Scott coined freelance in Ivanhoe in 1819 for a medieval mercenary, a fighting man whose lance was sworn to no lord and could be hired by anyone. By the 1860s it had left the battlefield and become a figure of speech, and by 1903 the dictionaries had accepted it as a verb. The lance is long gone; belonging to nobody is still the whole point.
From free + lance. coined by Walter Scott (1771–1832) in Ivanhoe (1819; freelance) to describe a medieval mercenary warrior or "free-lance" (indicating that the lance is not sworn to any lord's services). It changed to a figurative noun around the 1860s and was recognized as a verb in 1903 by authorities such as the Oxford English Dictionary. In modern times the term has morphed into an adjective, a verb, and an adverb, as well as the derivative noun freelancer.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA