Word.ws English Dictionary

half-free

half-free adjective: halfway or partially free.

Adjective

half-free (not comparable)

  1. Halfway or partially free.
    • Many half-free slaves were forced to continue to work for the Dutch West India Company even after they were set free, and the company even required half-free blacks to pay a yearly tax consisting of crops that they had raised on their farms.2013, Matthew W. Cody, Peter Stuyvesant: Dutch Leader of New Netherland (New York)
    • “Half-free” meant that the slaves themselves were now free, but their children would return to slavery. The Dutch gave a half-free slave named Gratia d'Angola a 10acre farm in the 1640s, centered around what is today one block of Greene Street between Prince Street and Houston Street, in the SoHo...2014, William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts
    Synonyms:
    semifree

Examples of half-free in a sentence

  • “Half-free” meant that the slaves themselves were now free, but their children would return to slavery.2014, William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts:
  • Yet first, the anonymous rabbis and students begin the sequence of explorations in legality of marriage between half-free people by using more general rules of betrothal.2015, Ernst van den Hemel, Asja Szafraniec, Words: Religious Language Matters:

Synonyms of half-free

Origin of half-free

From Middle English *half-free, from Old English healffrēo (“half-free”), equivalent to half- + free. Cognate with Dutch halfvrij (“half-free”), German halbfrei (“half-free”), Danish halvfri (“half-free”).

Questions about half-free

What does half-free mean?
Half-free means halfway or partially free.
How do you use half-free in a sentence?
“Half-free” meant that the slaves themselves were now free, but their children would return to slavery.
What part of speech is half-free?
Half-free is an adjective.

Words near half-free in the dictionary

  1. half-finished
  2. half-first cousin
  3. half-first cousins
  4. half-forgotten
  5. half-frame
  6. half-free
  7. half-fuck
  8. half-gip
  9. half-gips
  10. half-god
  11. half-gods

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: half-free (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: “half-free.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/half-free. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.