freeing

Pluralfreeings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of free.

   Freeing the hostages became the negotiator's only goal.

   They spent hours freeing the boat from the thick mud.

   Note

   The participle carries every transitive use of free, so it nearly always takes an object. You free the hostages, free a boat from mud, and, in programming, free memory back to the system. The same spelling also serves as the noun for liberation, which can be plural, and as the adjective meaning liberating, which compares with more and most.

2. 2
   adjective

   Releasing someone from constraints, or leaving them with a welcome sense of freedom.

   She found the decision to leave her job surprisingly freeing.

   There was something freeing about packing light and leaving the city behind.

   Similarliberating

   Oppositeconfining, restrictive, stifling

   Note

   Here the word describes the feeling something gives rather than a release that takes place. A decision, an idea or a trip can be freeing. It is gradable, so something can be more freeing or most freeing, and it takes modifying adverbs, as in Jesse Hassenger's "potentially freeing idea" (2024). Liberating is its closest synonym and fits the same frames.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of making something or someone free; liberation.

   The freeing of the prisoners marked the end of the long conflict.

   Her sudden freeing from years of debt changed the whole family's outlook.

   Similarliberation, release, emancipation, rescue, deliverance

   Oppositeimprisonment, capture, confinement, enslavement

   Note

   A verbal noun that keeps the verb's grammar. What is freed follows of, and what it is freed from follows from, as when Lee Waters in 2024 speaks of the freeing of funding from road schemes. Unlike many -ing nouns it also takes a plural: Gayl Jones's Liberating Voices (1991) discusses "these freeings of voices."

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