Other forms: freestyles, freestyling
Freestyle is the race where the rules let you swim any way you like — so everybody swims front crawl, because it is the fastest. The 100m freestyle, a school gala, a lane of arms going over and over.
Wherever a sport lets competitors pick their own moves, freestyle is the word: freestyle skiing, freestyle wrestling, freestyle motocross. In music and dance it means made up on the spot — a rapper freestyles a verse nobody wrote down, a dancer freestyles once the routine runs out. It works as noun, adjective and verb, and it is one word: freestyle, not free style.
1nounfreestyleA swimming race in which any stroke is allowed, so almost everyone swims front crawl.~54%
“She won the 200m freestyle by half a second.”
2noundanceA performance made up on the spot, with no set routine — in rap, dance or skating.~17%
“The last minute of the set was pure freestyle.”
3verbscriptTo make something up as you go, with no script and no routine.~2%
“He can freestyle over any beat you give him.”
4adjectivedoneDone without fixed moves or a set routine.~27%
“She trains with the freestyle team on Thursdays.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 147 sentences found in the wild and placed 136 of them on a sense (11 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Freestyle is free plus style, and style is the older half. Latin stilus was a pointed instrument for writing — the thing you scratched letters with. The mark it left became the way a person wrote, and then the way a person does anything at all. Freestyle is that, with the rules taken off.
From free + style.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA