freeman

From Old English frēomann, equivalent to free +‎ -man and paralleled by similar constructions in other Germanic languages. Doublet of preman.

• IPA^(key): /ˈfɹiː.mən/, /ˈfɹiːˌmæn/

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freeman (plural freemen)

1. A free person, particularly:
   1. (usually historical) A person who is not a serf or slave.

      Antonyms: nonfreeman, slave, bondsman, serf

      Hyponym: freedman (one who has become free)

      • 1997 [1797], David W. Blight, “Editor's Introduction: The Peculiar Dialogue Between Caleb Bingham and Frederick Douglass”, in Caleb Bingham, edited by David W. Blight, The Columbian Orator, Bicentennial Edition (1997 republishing), New York University Press, →ISBN:

        [Editor David W. Blight said:] Deeply in need of father figures and spiritual hope, and “religiously seeking knowledge,” as he recalled it, the slave boy [the young Frederick Douglass] turned to a religious black man, a freeman named Charles Lawson, who worked as a drayman for a rope maker and lived on Happy Alley in Fells Point. Frederick spent countless hours with Lawson in the drayman’s shack reading the bible aloud, singing hymns, and praying together. “I could teach him the letter, but he could teach me the spirit,” Douglass remembered. Throughout his life Douglass would teach his teachers and learn from them at the same time. From old Lawson he gained […] above all […] a belief in a benevolent and protective God, the faith that his “life was under the guidance of a wisdom higher than my own.”

   2. (historical) A burgher with full freedom of a city, as opposed to nobles, outsiders, bondsmen, and others.

      Hypernyms: citizen, burgher, burgess < resident < person

   3. A person who has received an honorary freedom of a city.
   4. (usually as two words) A person who is a citizen of a free country, as opposed to a subject of a tyranny or totalitarian dictatorship.
      • 1836, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., “Poetry: A Metrical Essay”, republished in The Poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, 1862, OCLC 5091562, pages 7–8:

        There breathes no being but has some pretence / To that fine instinct called poetic sense; […] / The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand / The vote that shakes the turrets of the land.

   5. (Australia, historical) A person who immigrated to Australia freely, as opposed to those transported as convicts, or such a transported convict who has regained his freedom.
   7. (US and Canada, historical) An independent furtaker.

      Hypernyms: furtaker < person

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