All articles starting with F
15,892 articles
Free Theater movement
The Free Theater movement (المسرح الحر) is a tradition in Egyptian theater of self-organized, non-state troupes performing outside official institutions, first formed by drama graduates in September 1952.
Free throw
Free throw: one-point unhindered shot in basketball from the 15-foot free throw line, awarded after fouls; 10-second NBA limit, lane and disconcertion violations, FIBA vs NBA rules, 1895 line change.
Free tissue transfer
Free tissue transfer is a reconstructive microsurgical procedure that moves skin, muscle, or bone with its blood supply to a distant site, reconnecting its vessels to recipient vessels.
Free to Be... You and Me
Free to Be... You and Me is a 1972 children's album conceived by Marlo Thomas with Ms. Magazine's Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin, challenging gender stereotypes; it became a gold record, a 1974 ABC special (Emmy, Peabody), and a 2020 National Recording Registry inductee.
Free trade
Free trade, also called trade liberalization, is trade across national borders without government-imposed barriers such as tariffs, import quotas, and licensing restrictions, governed in part by WTO rules.
Free trade agreement
Free trade agreement (FTA): reciprocal treaty eliminating tariffs and trade barriers on substantially all goods between parties, permitted under GATT Article XXIV; distinct from unilateral preferential trade arrangements; examples include USMCA, CPTPP, RCEP, and AfCFTA.
Free trade area
A free trade area is a group of customs territories that eliminate duties on substantially all trade among members, each keeping its own external tariffs, which requires rules of origin.
Free University of Berlin
Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin), founded 4 December 1948 in Dahlem with US support as a free alternative to the Soviet-sector University of Unter den Linden; Germany's first reform university, now a University of Excellence in the Berlin University Alliance.
Free variables and bound variables
In formal logic, a free variable is not bound by a quantifier and a bound variable is; the distinction applies to occurrences, and formulas without free variables are sentences.
Free verse
Free verse (vers libre): poetry without fixed meter or rhyme, following speech cadence and lineation. Rooted in Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass and French Symbolism, dominant in English poetry since about 1920.
Free verse movement
The free verse movement, also called shi'r al-taf'ila (حركة الشعر الحر), arose in Iraq in 1947 and replaced the classical two-hemistich Arabic line with single-line verse of variable metrical feet.
Free volume theory
Free volume theory is a family of models in polymer and glass physics explaining viscosity, diffusion, and the glass transition through the empty space between molecules or chain segments.
Free Voters
Free Voters (Freie Wähler) is a German centrist party rooted in local independent voter associations, strongest in Bavaria where it won 15.8% and 37 seats in 2023 and governs as junior coalition partner; it joined the European Democratic Party in 2015.
Free water clearance
Free water clearance is a renal physiology measure of the rate at which the kidneys excrete or retain solute-free water, used to guide hyponatremia treatment.
Free Weezy Album
Free Weezy Album (FWA) is Lil Wayne's July 4, 2015 album, released exclusively on Tidal amid his Cash Money Records dispute over Tha Carter V; 15 tracks, 10 million first-week streams, re-released as FWA in 2020.
Free will
Free will is the agent's capacity for significant control over action, debated since Plato and Aristotle. Main positions are compatibilism, libertarianism, and skepticism; determinism, the Consequence Argument, Libet's readiness potential, and modern physics shape the debate.
Free will in theology
Free will in theology concerns whether human choice is compatible with divine foreknowledge, sovereignty, and predestination. Also called the problem of theological fatalism; central figures include Augustine, Aquinas, al-Maturidi; positions differ across Calvinism, Catholicism, Islam, and Eastern religions.
Free Willy
Free Willy is a 1993 American family drama film directed by Simon Wincer and distributed by Warner Bros., about a boy who befriends a captive orca named Willy.
Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home
Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home (1995) is the second Free Willy film, directed by Dwight H. Little for Warner Bros. Teenager Jesse reunites with the orca Willy to save his pod from an oil spill; it grossed $30,077,111 domestically.
Free World
The Free World is a Cold War-era phrase for democratic and capitalist countries, especially the Western Bloc opposed to communism; it later came to mean the world's democracies generally.
Free writing
Free writing is a writing exercise in which a person writes continuously for a set period without stopping or editing, used to build fluency and reduce writing anxiety.
Free-electron laser
A free-electron laser (FEL) is a device that generates intense, tunable coherent radiation from free electrons moving through an undulator, first operated at Stanford in 1976.
Free-electron quantum optics
Free-electron quantum optics is an emerging field of physics studying coherent quantum-mechanical interactions between free-electron wave packets and light and material excitations, with milestones including electron-photon entanglement demonstrated in 2025.
Free-electron–photon entanglement
Free-electron–photon entanglement is a quantum state in which a free electron and photons share correlations no classical description can reproduce, first demonstrated in April 2025 by researchers in Göttingen.
Free-energy relationship
A free-energy relationship, or linear free-energy relationship (LFER), is a linear correlation between rate or equilibrium constants of related reaction series in physical organic chemistry.
Free-fall time
The free-fall time is the time a self-gravitating gas cloud would take to collapse if gravity acted alone; in star formation it serves as the fundamental clock.
Free-flow electrophoresis
Free-flow electrophoresis (FFE) is a continuous separation technique in which an electric field deflects charged molecules, cells, and organelles into distinct streams, developed since the late 1950s.
Free-flow speed
Free-flow speed (FFS) is the speed vehicles travel when unaffected by other vehicles, traffic control, or surrounding conditions, and it anchors capacity and level-of-service analysis in traffic engineering.
Free-radical theory of aging
Free-radical theory of aging, also called oxidative stress theory, proposed by Denham Harman in 1954–1956: aging results from cumulative free-radical damage, revised in 1972 to a mitochondrial version, now heavily criticized.
Free-range eggs
Free-range eggs come from uncaged hens with continuous outdoor access during lay, per USDA grademark rules. Distinct from cage-free (no outdoor requirement) and pasture-raised; carries an 18.7% US retail premium and higher hen disease and predation risks.