Freelancers. Where does that word come from?
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Lances at the ready!
Happy National Freelancers Day!
There is a day celebrating just about everything under the sun, and today is National Freelancers Day. This year the events organised for it are, of course, all virtual.
Freelancers are self-employed and the number of self-employed in the UK approaches five million. The self-employed are often lauded as the growth engine of the economy.
The word freelancer is a derivative of freelance. Nowadays freelance is a humdrum sort of word, but historically it’s a bit more romantic, even swashbuckling.
It is a romantic word
It’s a metaphor, or a figurative extension of its original meaning. The metaphor is completely dead, killed off by the word being used in its modern meaning for well over century.
For the ‘lance’ in freelance is that gruesome weapon wielded by mounted medieval knights and used to spear or unsaddle their enemies.
The famous battle on the ice in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky captures the awe and terror such knights must have inspired.
And freelance was originally two words. Free lances were mercenary knights who would fight on any side and were mainly interested in plunder. (Nowadays they might be known less charitably as lance tarts).
Some free lances rose to dizzy heights. The most renowned is probably Sir John Hawkwood (c. 1323–1394), a hugely successful mercenary in France and Italy, where he fought for the Pisans, the Visconti duke of Milan (his father-in-law) the Pope, and the Florentines. He is immortalised in the Duomo in Florence by a fresco by no less an artist than Uccello.
Ivanhoe
The first use of the word that we know of is by Sir Walter Scott, in his novel of chivalric derring-do, Ivanhoe. ‘I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances’ (two words, and capitalised).
And the first use of it in something approaching our modern sense, but with the metaphor still being made explicit, as if to explain the word, is from Hansard in 1854:
I think I may call that portion of the Government political ‘free lances.’ In the course of the last four years they have been ready to enlist under any banner—to wear any uniform.
Does it have a hyphen?
In the Oxford English Corpus it is overwhelmingly written as one word, which is modern practice, and how Oxford dictionaries, including the OED, spell it.
The form ‘freelance’ as a noun is rather more often used than ‘freelancer’
A versatile word
Just as the original free lances attached themselves to any cause that would pay their wages, so the word ‘freelance’ attaches itself, as it were, to different parts of speech. Not content with being a noun, it is also:
An adjective – a freelance consultant;
An adverb – to write freelance; and
A verb – she freelances for different publishers.
No pundits that I know of have castigated it for being used as a verb, unlike, say, interface and scores of others that commit the heinous sin of verbing.
Freelancing in other languages
A check in French, Spanish, Italian, German and Russian dictionaries suggests that the image of a gallant knight has not carried over to those languages. The idea is conveyed by phrases meaning ‘to work for yourself’, ‘be independent’ and so on. But in French there’s an adverbial phrase – travailler en free-lance – and in Italian it works as an adjective – un fotografo freelance.
Wishing you a productive day!
