Definition of "freemason" [free•ma•son]

• A member of the Free and Accepted Masons, an international fraternal and charitable organization with secret rites and signs. (noun)
• A member of a guild of skilled itinerant masons during the Middle Ages. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Quite recently W. Begemann [7] combats the opinion of Speth [8] as purely hypothetical, stating that the name freemason originally designated particularly skilled freestone-masons, needed at the time of the most magnificent evolution of Gothic architecture, and nothing else."
• "In English law the word freemason is first mentioned in 1495, while frank-mason occurs already in an Act of 1444-1445."
• "In Mesbah Yazdi's vernacular, a "freemason" is an anti-clerical person."