free reign

English

Etymology

Eggcorn misconstruction of free rein (literally “relaxed reins (on a horse)”), confounding rein (“straps used in steering”) with reign (“rule”).

Noun

free reign

  1. (nonstandard, sometimes proscribed) Alternative form of free rein

Usage notes

Evidence from various corpora suggests that 25% (in 2008 per Google Books Ngram data[1]) to 46% (in 2007 per Oxford English Corpus data)[2] of uses of "free rein" or "free reign" in English texts are of "free reign", leading some references to consider it an acceptable variant spelling.

References
  1. Ngram Viewer
  2. Are We Giving Free Rei(g)n to New Spelling, October 18th, 2007, Ben Zimmer, OUPblog

Further reading

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