In
linguistics, 'free morphemes' (sometimes also referred to as 'unbound morphemes') are
morphemes that can stand alone, unlike
bound morphemes, which occur only as parts of words. In the
English sentence ''
colorless green ideas sleep furiously'', for example, ''color'', ''green'', ''idea'', and ''sleep'' are all free morphemes, whereas ''-less'', ''-s'' and ''-ly'' are all bound morphemes.
See also
★
bound morpheme
★
root morpheme
★
grammatical particle