free fall
Other forms: free falls
Free fall is when something falls only under gravity's force, the way a skydiver is in free fall until her parachute opens and slows her descent.
Anything that plummets to the ground, pulled there by the force of gravity, is in free fall. Your little brother jumping from the high dive is in free fall until he hits the pool water. A figurative way to use free fall is to mean "declining sharply," as when reporters talk about the plummeting stock market being in free fall, for example. The term first appeared in 1919, describing parachutists and rockets.
Definitions of free fall
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the ideal falling motion of something subject only to a gravitational field
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a sudden sharp decrease in some quantity
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types:
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correction
a drop in stock market activity or stock prices following a period of increases
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voltage drop
a decrease in voltage along a conductor through which current is flowing
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correction
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