free agent
free agent noun: a professional athlete who is free to play for or sign a contract to play for any team.
Noun
free agent (plural free agents)
- A professional athlete who is free to play for or sign a contract to play for any team.
- Or, if that’s too cringe, you can put it like The Wall Street Journal did at the end of last month: “With this spending bonanza and frenzy of movement, AI geeks are being treated more like NBA free agents.”2025 July 14, Katie Baker, quoting Wall Street Journal, “The Summer of Free AI-gency”, in The Ringer
- A person who acts freely, or without constraint to a higher power.
- Nevertheless, in despite of the shackles by which he is bound, it is pretended he is a free agent, or that independent of the causes by which he is moved, he determines his own will; regulates his own condition.1820 [1770], “Of the System of Man's free agency”, in The System of Nature, translation of Système de la Nature by Paul Henri Thiry Holbach
Forms of free agent
| plural | free agents |
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Questions about free agent
- What does free agent mean?
- Free agent means a professional athlete who is free to play for or sign a contract to play for any team.
- What part of speech is free agent?
- Free agent is a noun.
- What is the plural of free agent?
- The plural of free agent is free agents.
Words near free agent in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: free agent (page history and authors). 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.
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Cite this entry: “free agent.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/free_agent. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.