Meaning

7 senses
  1. 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.

    Freistaat

    свобо́дное госуда́рствоsvobódnoje gosudárstvo

  2. 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.

  3. An independent or autonomous political entity whose formal status and relationship to other states is undefined.

  4. 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.

  5. A condition of not being supported or constrained by outside forces.

  6. (US, historical)Before the American Civil War, any of the states in which slaveownership was illegal.

    any state prohibiting slavery prior to the American Civil War

  7. 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).

Examples

1 sentences
  1. Algeria is a free and independent state.

Translations

3 languages
Русский
By meaning 1
political entity whose political status is less than that of a fully sovereign nation-state:
Deutsch
By meaning 1
political entity whose political status is less than that of a fully sovereign nation-state:

Origin

From free + state, probably a calque of German Freistaat.

From free + state, probably a calque of German Freistaat.

Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

Forms

plural: free states
Singularfree state
Pluralfree states

regular

Synonyms

5 synonyms
Close in meaning
  • a province in central South Africa that was colonized by the Boers; named Free State in 1997:Orange Free State
  • a Mid-Atlantic state; one of the original 13 colonies, with capital Annapolis:MarylandOld Line StateMDMd.

Antonyms

1 antonyms

See also

neighbours in the dictionary

Dictionary text adapted from Wiktionary (Wiktionary contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0) and Open English WordNet / Princeton WordNet (CC BY 4.0, WordNet License); shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Example sentences and recordings are credited where they appear.

free state — meaning, examples, forms, synonyms | Krumeto