Word.ws English Dictionary

free-for-all

UK/ˈfɹiːfəɹɔːl//ˈfɹiːfɚɔːl/

free-for-all noun: chaos; a chaotic situation lacking rules or control.

Noun

free-for-all (plural free-for-alls)

  1. (idiomatic) Chaos; a chaotic situation lacking rules or control.
    • When the fire alarm went off, it was a free-for-all.
    • Competition was the order of the day: the industrial warfare of the sixties was a free-for-all.1919, Burton Jesse Hendrick, The Age of Big Business
    Synonyms:
    FFA
  2. A deathmatch, sometimes specifically one in which every player is pitted against all the others.

Adjective

free-for-all (not comparable)

  1. Of a fight, competition, etc., characterized by the absence or scarcity of formal rules or limitations.
    • Men, as well as women, were springing in to the rope and pulling. No longer was it team against team, but all Oakland against all San Francisco, festooned with a free-for-all fight.1913 October, Jack London, The Valley of the Moon, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC
    • Then Lucy told him about the great passion of her father—about the long, time-honored custom of free-for-all races, and the great races that had been run in the past; […]1917, Zane Grey, Wildfire

free-for-all meaning in Hindi, Malayalam and Tagalog

free-for-all in Hindi

chaos
आपाधापी āpādhāpī

free-for-all in Malayalam

scuffle, brawl, fight
കൂട്ടയടി, സന്നിഹിതരായ സകലരും ചെർന്നുള്ള അടികലശൽ, പൊരിഞ്ഞ അടി, ബഹളവും കൂട്ടയടിയും, അടിപിടി, അടിലഹള

free-for-all in Tagalog

chaos
hilabo

Examples of free-for-all in a sentence

  • […] this was a consequence of building Tubes by means of a competitive free-for-all.2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 134:
  • But, he added, “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences!”2022 October 27, Lauren Hirsch, quoting Elon Musk, “Elon Musk Reaches Out to Advertisers Ahead of Deadline for Twitter Deal”, in The New...

Synonyms of free-for-all

Forms of free-for-all

pluralfree-for-alls

Questions about free-for-all

What does free-for-all mean?
Free-for-all means chaos; a chaotic situation lacking rules or control.
What is free-for-all in Hindi?
Free-for-all in Hindi is आपाधापी (āpādhāpī). See Free-for-all meaning in Hindi.
How do you use free-for-all in a sentence?
[…] this was a consequence of building Tubes by means of a competitive free-for-all.
What part of speech is free-for-all?
Free-for-all can be a noun or an adjective.
How do you pronounce free-for-all?
Free-for-all is pronounced /ˈfɹiːfəɹɔːl/ (UK).
What is the plural of free-for-all?
The plural of free-for-all is free-for-alls.

Words near free-for-all in the dictionary

  1. free-floating planets
  2. free-flowing
  3. free-flown
  4. free-fly
  5. free-flying
  6. free-for-all
  7. free-for-alls
  8. free-form
  9. free-forms
  10. free-from
  11. free-hand

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: free-for-all (page history and authors); free-for-all (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-free-for-all.ogg, en-au-free-for-all.ogg.

Cite this entry: “free-for-all.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/free-for-all. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.