Where does the term freelance come from?

The term freelance dates back to 1819 when Sir Walter Scott referred to soldiers who worked for payment, rather than loyalty to a particular party of the king, as "free lances" in his book Ivanhoe. Earlier references to the word were also seen in texts from 1716 and 1809. However, there is little knowledge of those publications.

In the early years, "free lance" was also used to refer to independent politicians, and it became a common term used to refer to writers in the 1930s. Written evidence suggests that the word "free lance" was primarily used in the early 1800s before it was hyphenated to "freelance" in the 1920s. By the 1970s, the hyphen was dropped, and the modern word "freelance" emerged.