Freehold is a legal way of owning land or a building. If you have the freehold, the place is yours outright, for an unlimited time — you are not merely renting the right to use it for a set number of years. In Britain, Australia and some other places, people set freehold against leasehold: leasehold means you hold the property for a fixed time, then it goes back. The word lives in contracts, estate agents' windows and law, not in ordinary chat about “my house.” You may hear it as a noun (they bought the freehold) or as a kind of label (a freehold house). Though actually, “free” here does not mean you pay nothing. You may pay a great deal. It means the ownership is not tied to a landlord's clock. Taiwan's land system is not built on this British pair of words, so students mostly meet freehold when they read about property abroad.