Definition of "free-handed"

No man has been at greater straits than I, and has borne more pinching poverty and hardship; but nobody can say of me that, if I had a guinea, I was not free-handed with it, and did not spend it as well as a lord could do.

1844, William Makepeace Thackeray, The Luck of Barry Lyndon

This tendency of his to be liberal and profuse he had acquired from having been a soldier in his youth, for the soldier's life is a school in which the niggard becomes free-handed and the free-handed prodigal

2015, Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

This chapter discusses the role of patellofemoral arthroplasty for isolated patellofemoral arthritis, describes a free-handed, uninstrumented MIS surgical technique, and reviews the results of the procedure (independent of surgical approach).

2009, Giles R. Scuderi, Alfred J. Tria, Minimally Invasive Surgery in Orthopedics, page 341

Meanwhile, and contradictorily to this contraction of currency, the collapse of National Bank that had earlier put limits on the free-handed lending policies of state banks allowed these to flood much of the country with cheap paper money.

2009, Kenneth C. Wenzer, Ross B. Emmett, Henry George, the Transatlantic Irish, and Their Times, page ii

But the opinion of Gray, J., in that case can hardly bear the interpretation that State Courts are free to play whatever tricks they please with the State law... A retrograde movement to free-handed State judicial iconoclasm is impossible.

2002, Henry Schofield, Essays on Constitutional Law and Equity and Other Subjects, page 37

A short way ahead Kaveri was startled to see a woman carrying a child in her arms as well as a load on her head while the man twirled his moustache and walked beside her, free-handed.

1990, Lakșmi, Ripples in the River, page 22

This distinction is all the more important when we are in a jurisdiction where the free-handed mortgage of a stock in trade is unlawful.

1943, Garrard Glenn, Mortgages, deeds of trust, and other security devices as to land, Volume 3, page 409

And all men that have loved right more than ease, And honor above honors; all who gave Free-handed of their best for other men, And thought their giving taking...

2015, Brander Matthews, Poems of American Patriotism

The burghers go in velvets and furs, but they have not learned to leap free-handed to horse nor to aim with the lance at the four nailes of the shield, nor yet to ride a buhurd, therefore they need a duke who protects them, and that am I.

1951, Thomas Mann, The Holy Sinner, page 30

You can cut in around stained trim or into another color free-handed like a painter or with painter's tape.

2004, Steve Jordan, Judy Ostrow, Painting Kitchens, page 46

To wit: If the United States is to intervene for the pacification of Cuba it should do so free-handed;

2007, Louis A. Pérez, Cuba Between Empires, 1878-1902, page 183