free verse
Americannoun
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free verses
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of free verse
First recorded in 1905–10
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Mr. Power’s previous books have mostly been about 18th-century writers, yet he is as much at home with recent free verse as with rhymed couplets and sonnets.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 28, 2026
I’ve been in a fight with my husband about free verse versus poetic form.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 11, 2026
It spans 22 panels, down which Cendrars’s free verse runs in 30 different typefaces.
From New York Times ● Aug. 3, 2023
He wrote her postmodern poems — written in free verse, which she had never read before — and taught her how to write her own.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 5, 2022
Feeling for the first time that I could speak to listening ears, I wrote a wild, crude poem in free verse, coining images of black hands playing, working, holding bayonets, stiffening finally in death ...
From "Black Boy" by Richard Wright
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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.