Dictionary
free' varia'tion
Ling.
a relation between the members of a pair of phones, phonemes, morphs, or other linguistic entities such that either of the two may occur in the same position with no change in the meaning of the utterance: in the first syllable of “economics,”
“e” and
“ē” are in free variation. Cf.
complementary distribution.Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Copyright © 1997, by Random House, Inc., on Infoplease.