a shape having an irregular contour, chiefly used in nonrepresentational art and industrial design.
Linguistics. a linguistic form that can occur by itself, as fire, book, or run.
characterized by free form.
free-form sculpture.
not organized or planned in a conventional way.
a free-form international conglomerate.
encouraged to function or evolve without advance planning; spontaneous.
free-form management.
First recorded in 1945–50
First recorded in 1950–55
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
But celebrities don’t have a lock on this free form, open-mic talent show.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 30, 2020
“Los Olvidados” progressed like a soap opera, one scene cutting into the seemingly unrelated next one — highlights being jet-speed free form and mournful march sections with beautiful solos from Shepp and a wah-wah-muted ElSaffar.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 11, 2019
For one moment, there is only the molten dawn sun lighting the sky a poet red and the air racing cooly past him as he drops in free form flight.
From Slate ● Feb. 19, 2018
So Twitter appears stuck between implementing some safeguards that could change the free form nature of its service and continuing to passively enable the harassment of its users.
From The Verge ● Jul. 22, 2016
It was for Bach and Händel practically a free form.
From A Popular History of the Art of Music From the Earliest Times Until the Present by Mathews, W. S. B. (William Smythe Babcock)
Its asymmetrical, free-form plate-glass top rests on a base made of two identical, U-shaped wooden legs —a configuration that blurs distinctions between primitivism and classicism, the organic and the engineered, furniture and art.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 1, 2026
Ellen Schwartz, 82, told me this Canadian-founded group operates without recognized leaders — an “international free-form group of gaggles of grannies,” is how she put it, and I wrote it all down for Kash Patel.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 19, 2025
The free-form jazz in the film makes the atmosphere almost farcical, a choice that feels even more strange when Bong introduces the apartment complex’s janitor, who has a taste for dog meat.
From Salon ● Mar. 25, 2025
Names splattered in from leftfield, a free-form approach to positions, a delicious cheese-dream of a bench – a side picked like Jackson Pollock paints.
From BBC ● Mar. 14, 2025
The woman who'd let us in was mixing drinks behind a handsome free-form bar which was large enough to have graced a night club.
From "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
