That’s right, people . . . it’s one of those days when Dr. Doyle waxes, if not wroth, at least a little bit cranky about the latest writing-related pebble in her metaphorical sandal.
Okay, then. Listen up.
The phrase is not “free reign.” It’s “free rein.”
Why? Because it’s a horsemanship metaphor. In equestrian usage, “free rein” refers to a rein held loosely to allow a horse free motion, or to the freedom that doing so gives to the horse.
(It refers, in other words, not to having control or power over somebody or something, but to having self-determination or freedom of choice in a particular situation.)
Dr. Doyle's Blog 
~* FREE REIGN *~
with every marriage to Anne Neville
–sign at Warwick the Kingmaker’s
“Are you Edmund Mortimer? If not, have you got him?”
Thank you! Thank you! Oh, thank you…now I don’t have to…thanks…thanks…oh….
…you’re welcome?
(It looks like I’m not the only reader who’s rendered peevish by this particular error.)
The list of my peeves in English usage would rival the Wheel of Time in length.
Thanks! Far too many fictional horses are ridden with ‘reigns’ as well- they might be kingly mounts but even princes ride with ‘reins’. Its enough to make me drop the book all by itself.
No kidding. It’s when I see goofs like that in something that’s supposedly been professionally copyedited that I really start to froth at the mouth.
Headline: “Reign of Terror Perps Arraigned for Rain of Unreined Prose.”
(I’m better, now.)
This one drives me insane. No matter what I’m reading, it throws me right out of the sense of the story. Have you run across “discrete” when the writer means “discreet”? I always flinch at that one, too.
I get that one all the time. Unfortunately.
I’m laughing out loud, but… The literacy level seems to be continuing to drop, with all those “one year anniversary morons and people who use “factoid” in exactly the opposite way the word was invented to designate, and the disappearance of verbals.. It would neer havre occurred to me that someone woul had written “free reign” intentionally as other than a pun…