free reign
English
Etymology
Eggcorn misconstruction of free rein (literally “relaxed reins (on a horse)”), confounding rein (“straps used in steering”) with reign (“rule”).
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
- Ngram Viewer
- Are We Giving Free Rei(g)n to New Spelling, October 18th, 2007, Ben Zimmer, OUPblog
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