free state
free state noun: a political entity whose political status is less than that of a fully sovereign nation-state, as with the former Congo Free State and the former Irish Free State.
Noun (1)
free state (plural free states)
- A political entity whose political status is less than that of a fully sovereign nation-state, as with the former Congo Free State and the former Irish Free State.
- A Federal state, with allegiance to a larger entity, as currently with Germany, and earlier, the relationship between the states of the Holy Roman Empire and the Emperor, and later, the states of the German Empire under the Hohenzollerns.
- An independent or autonomous political entity whose formal status and relationship to other states is undefined.
- A republic or commonwealth, as with the former Orange Free State, and especially as used for the current United Kingdom to refer to the Commonwealth period under Cromwell.
- A condition of not being supported or constrained by outside forces.
- The steel ring is required by the engineering drawing to have roundness within .25mm TIR while in the free state. Its diameters may be measured in the constrained state while the part is still chucked or fixtured.
- Before the American Civil War, any of the states in which slaveownership was illegal.
- A noun form in Afroasiatic languages contrasting with the construct state by the noun not being dependent (more commonly called absolute state, or indeterminate state if the specific language contrasts a determinate state with the construct state).
Proper noun capitalized: Free State
the Free State
- A province of South Africa. Capital: Bloemfontein, formerly Orange Free State.
- Nickname for Maryland: a state of the United States.
- The Irish Free State.
- Irish republican term for the present-day Republic of Ireland.
Noun (2) capitalized: Free State
Free State (plural Free States)
- Alternative letter-case form of free state.
Forms of free state
| plural | free states |
|---|---|
| plural | Free States |
Origin of free state
From free + state, probably a calque of German Freistaat.
Proprialisation of free state.
Words formed from free state
Questions about free state
- What does free state mean?
- Free state means a political entity whose political status is less than that of a fully sovereign nation-state, as with the former Congo Free State and the former Irish Free State.
- What part of speech is free state?
- Free state can be a noun or a proper noun.
- What is the plural of free state?
- The plural of free state is free states.
Words near free state in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: free state (page history and authors); Free State (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 state.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/free_state. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.