Without ceremony; casual; informal. This expression, an older equivalent of today’s slangy hanging loose, acquired a new meaning as a noun in the nineteenth century, when for a time a “free-and-easy” was a saloon or a house of ill fame. “He would have a song about it, and sing it at the ‘free and easies,’” wrote J. C. Neal in his Charcoal Sketches (1837). This meaning did not survive, however, while the eighteenth-century sense of casualness did.