Free
The history of the word free is both delightful and sad.
Originally it is from the Proto Indo European root prijos, meaning “dear, beloved”. This root has many proud descendants, including filibuster, friend, Frigg, and Friday. Note in particular that a variant of prijos, pritu, came to mean “peace”, and lies behind Siegfried (”peace of victory”), afraid (the “a-” means “not”, so “afraid” is “not at peace”), Godfrey (”peace of God”), and Jeffrey / Geoffrey (”land of peace”).
In Proto Germanic, prijos became frijaz. Around this time, frijaz extended its core meaning of “beloved” to also mean “free, not enslaved”. Why? Because it’s at this time that the Germanic peoples began to take slaves into their households. Those in your household who were beloved were also free.
In Old English, frijaz’s descendant freo continued to mean both “free” and “beloved” (in fact it often was used to mean “wife”), but eventually the “beloved” meaning dropped away, and freo was simplified to free.
Free begins with “f”, a sound which symbolizes freedom directly. In free, this freedom is infused with great energy (”r”), and persists a long time despite hardship (long “e”); so that threats to freedom are indirectly encoded in the sounds of the word itself.
